MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The Shelby County Mayor’s Office is calling for answers into accusations of racial profiling the office has seen since the inception of the Memphis Safe Task Force.
The mayor said this Monday, just hours after a group working to track ICE raids posted on social media that a family had been detained for hours after they claimed federal agents were looking for someone who no longer lived in their northeast Memphis home, but still arrested a man.
It’s unclear which federal agencies took part, but the incident has left some pretty rattled in the neighborhood off Jackson Avenue.
“I see a lot of sheriffs, state troopers, yeah I see a lot, even Border Patrol,” said a woman who asked not to be identified. “I feel kind of scared about it because you know we have family. … It makes me sad because I don’t know what’s going on.”
She lives in the Nutbush neighborhood, where she says it was her neighbors who were the subject of a recent case highlighted on social media by Vecindarios 901, a group that keeps track of ICE raids.
They recently shared an incident from the weekend, posting on social media that they received a call that federal officers had surrounded a home where a woman, her husband and their 11-year-old son were staying.
“They had a warrant for another person who had nothing to do with the family. Literally forced them out and at the moment handcuffed them,” the group said in a social media post. “After a long dialogue and volunteers of V901 released the woman, more than two hours negotiating and in the end they only arrested the husband. … Their motto was, not to leave empty-handed, and for an X excuse they stopped him, (they didn’t give details).”
The woman we spoke to says she recognizes there’s a crime issue in the city, but, “There’s a lot of they can go and look for the real people that make crime, not these families here.”
We asked Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris about the incident.
“Obviously I’m worried, I’m uncomfortable, as I said, and racial profiling is against the federal constitution,” Harris said. “We really need a response from the Governor, from Pam Bondi, whoever is planning this, around who is caught up in this dragnet and how do you respond to all the accounts of racial profiling that we’ve heard in this office and that other community leaders have heard.”
We reached out to a spokesperson with the task force as well as ICE to try and get more details about the incident.