In Nashville this past weekend, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, in conjunction with federal immigration officials, made 150 traffic stops in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood. In total, 84 people without permanent legal status were detained and taken to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, the Tennessee Lookout reported.
At a distance, it’s easy for many of us to see these people as mere numbers, as just another tally mark for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. It’s easy for us to see the estimated 128,000 unauthorized immigrants in Tennessee under the threat of this xenophobic crusade as just a fraction of this state’s population.
But each of those detained in Nashville this past weekend and each of those 128,000 now in a constant state of fear are people leading normal lives — a fact we too often fail to realize or one we simply ignore.
Many, this page included, point to the astronomical financial burden that anti-immigration policy entails. In Tennessee, our legislature, at the behest of Gov. Bill Lee, has thrown $5.5 million at the state’s effort to carry out the president’s immigration policy. For the nation as a whole, it is estimated that mass deportation of all undocumented migrants, according to the American Immigration Council, would cost us nearly a trillion dollars over the next decade.
But there is a much greater cost beyond the financial burden. As a consequence of our own collective ignorance, the lives of immigrants are being senselessly upended. Blinded by bigotry, holding on to our own fears, too many of us fail to see the human toll of mass deportation.