Nashville Mayor, Council Members Resorting to Performative Politics with Outrage Over ICE Arrests to Retain Far Left Voter Base, Reporter Says

Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell and members of the Metro Nashville Council are resorting to performative politics in response to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducting operations in Middle Tennessee as an effort to appease and retain its radical left-wing voter base.

Beginning Saturday evening, ICE and the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) have been conducting joint immigration enforcement operations in Middle Tennessee which has seen the arrests of over 100 individuals, including illegal aliens with violent criminal histories.

Mayor O’Connell and the Metro Council have since condemned the law enforcement operations.

In addition, during Wednesday’s meeting of the Metro Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee, Emergency Communications Director Stephen Martini indicated that the department is considering implementing new protocols to create a flagging system within the city’s emergency communications infrastructure.

The flagging system would be designed to identify and highlight requests from federal agencies – like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – that might relate to immigration enforcement, such as increased patrols near ICE facilities, and inform local officials and the public of potential enforcement actions in the future.

“A council member has in fact gotten the Nashville Emergency Services Center to commit to creating an early warning system so the next time a member of DHS says, ‘Hey, we’re going to need your help supporting us at an ICE facility, we might get some protestors,’ that will somehow now translate into a warning that will go out to illegal immigrants living in whatever part of Nashville this might happen in to tell them, stay indoors and don’t talk to the government,” Pappert explained on Friday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.

Noting how one council member reportedly tracked and posted ICE vehicle movements on social media, Pappert said the acts seen by some members of the Metro Council in response to the law enforcement operations appear to be “aiding and abetting the evasion of the law by illegal alien criminals.”

“It’s very rich coming from the folks who still to this day, Joe Biden just yesterday, are still saying what happened on January 6th, 2021 was an insurrection. Meanwhile, we have state and local officials broadcasting themselves going around and interfering with official business that the government is trying to complete, which makes us all safer, by the way,” Pappert said.

Pappert went on to frame the outrage expressed by the mayor and council members as performative politics aimed at appeasing Nashville’s radical left-wing voter base.

“It seems a little bit performative. In fact, I think a lot of this is merely a far left city and a far left city government being between a rock and a hard place and doing what they can to keep their radical left base that they’ve really gathered and curated over the past few years, keeping them plugged in and willing to vote for them when the next election comes up,” Pappert said.

Pappert said he also believes Nashville’s leniency toward illegal aliens is driven by electoral strategy, with the Democrats aiming to maintain far-left support and possibly incorporate illegal migrant populations into their future voter base.

“It seems to me that Nashville is doing everything it can to make illegal immigrants a special protected class so they can get as many votes as possible from their far left base, and maybe in a generation or two, these people will be part of the base,” Pappert said.

https://twitter.com/michaelpleahy/status/1920872284073718172

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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.