U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducting operations across the Upper Cumberland over the last two days, including arrests in Cookeville, Crossville and McMinnville.
Putnam County Sheriff Eddie Farris said agents want to locate and arrest specific individuals who are both undocumented and possess significant criminal backgrounds.Farris said the agency is not conducting broad sweeps of the general immigrant population or local businesses.
“They are here with some different outstanding warrants that they’re looking for some certain individuals who are illegal, not just illegal, they have a lengthy criminal history,” Farris said. “They are in town you know looking for those folks and trying to pick those folks up, and so that’s what’s going on with with their federal agency.”
Farris said local deputies are not patrolling the community to identify or apprehend individuals based solely on their immigration status. Farris said his department does not seek out undocumented people who are otherwise abiding by the law.
“We do not have that authority to do nor has that been happening,” Farris said. “I don’t look for ICE to be here every single day, they’ll be here for a few days and then they have, you know, Tennessee’s big. We have 95 counties in Tennessee and there’s a lot more places that’s more populated than ours so they’ll be here for the length of time that they have on looking for the folks that they have outstanding warrants on and then they’ll move on and go somewhere else.”
Farris said the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office maintains regular communication with federal partners and expects to receive several detainees at the county jail. Farris said the local facility utilizes a jail model to hold federal inmates and has the capability to check the legal status and criminal backgrounds of anyone booked into the jail.
“We do partner with ICE, number one we hold ICE inmates so that’s partner and number two we we participate in what we what they call the jail model,” Farris said. “So the jail model is if you get arrested in Putnam County and you come through obviously if you get arrested you’re going to come through our jail and when that happens we have the capability of checking to see if you’re illegal and then if you have a criminal history.”
Farris said the federal government is targeting individuals who have often entered and exited the country multiple times or have been arrested on serious charges within the United States. Farris said the information used to locate these individuals comes from federal databases and data shared by county jails across the state.
“They are not focusing on businesses at all, they’re not going to a business just to look for people that are illegal,” Farris said. “What they’re doing is focusing on individuals you know and I hope I make it clear, but people that are illegal, but not just illegal but possess criminal histories and maybe have outstanding warrants somewhere, some county in Tennessee.”
Farris said residents should not be afraid to go to school or seek medical attention, noting that he would intervene if he believed federal partners were acting unlawfully or mistreating people.