EJ Haust, a digital marketing expert and official guest host of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s efforts to help illegal aliens avoid law enforcement are not only undermining federal immigration operations but also obstructing the greater work of law enforcement between state and federal agencies, keeping all Tennesseans safe.
In response to a joint operation between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Tennessee Highway Patrol conducted in Nashville last month which saw the arrests of 196 criminal illegal aliens, O’Connell amended an executive order to mandate that Metro Nashville employees report contacts with federal immigration officials to him and the Office of New Americans – essentially creating an early warning system for immigrants to evade federal immigration enforcement.
In the time after O’Connell amended the executive order, the Office of New Americans published the names of ICE and Homeland Security Investigations officials, along with their interactions with local agencies, on its official Metro government website.
O’Connell also tied the Metro government to a “Belonging Fund,” which was found to have received seed money from nonprofits that were awarded millions in Biden-era stimulus money by Metro Nashville.
Haust said O’Connell’s efforts to shield illegal aliens from federal law enforcement actively undermine law enforcement cooperation on not only immigration enforcement, but also obstruct other important operations that require effective inter-agency coordination, including human trafficking.
“Getting to the bottom of whether or not the mayor is also communicating with these people and who in his office is communicating with these organizations is actually really important for the safety of everyone. Our officers need to know because remember, it’s not just the ICE agents either that are coming in. They’re working with local law enforcement,” Haust explained.
“We know…that we have a thoroughfare of human trafficking right in Davidson County. Right through the middle of our state. So we have to have coordination and it has to be safe for these law enforcement groups to do their jobs, and clearly [O’Connell’s] making it more difficult, which is obstruction,” she added.
Haust criticized the mayor’s silence on the matter and suggested he’s hiding behind legal counsel, further pointing out how O’Connell’s actions have caught the attention of Trump border czar Tom Homan.
“You know what’s interesting? He’s usually all over social media. He posts a bunch. He loves his transit stuff and he’s always posting pictures of him on his bike and junk like that. He loves his bicycle. But he’s silent on this. My guess is he has some legal counsel that is telling him to keep it quiet, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to hide from this. You’ve got the attention now of Tom Homan,” Haust said.
Haust further questioned why any leader would support criminal activity associated with illegal immigration before explaining how the more immigrants that flood into U.S. cities is a political strategy by the Left to bolster left-leaning demographics and influence census data to affect congressional redistricting.
“What’s the draw in helping illegal criminals? People who are murdering and raping and bringing drugs to our community and selling human beings, and then trafficking them over state lines and over borders. It doesn’t make any sense,” Haust said.
“It has a lot to do with the census and the number of House representatives that we get and whatnot. So when they see that a city is booming and lots of people are moving there, those who are running the effort to change the makeup of the United States electorate see that as an opportunity to push more people into those areas…so they can peel off and get another blue representative in Congress. That’s really the goal,” she added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
