Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, suggests the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security appears to be prioritizing federal interests and Biden-era policies over state enforcement or transparency as it slow walks two Open Records Requests filed by The Star seeking materials related to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the citizen of El Salvador who was stopped by Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) in 2022 and deported by the Trump administration last month.
Last week, The Star was the first to report that Abrego Garcia was suspected of being engaged in human trafficking by THP officers who detained him during a 2022 traffic stop on I-40 in Putnam County; however, he was let go at the time after the Biden-era Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) requested that the state officers release him and the eight other passengers in the vehicle.
The Star has since filed two Open Records Requests with the Department of Safety and Homeland Security’s Safety and Open Records Office seeking all materials – incident reports, computerized dispatch reports, photographs, dashboard and body camera footage, and any other records – related to the stop of Abrego Garcia in late 2022.
“It seems to me that for whatever reason, the bias at the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security is in favor of the Biden-era FBI and all of these Biden-era governmental entities rather than the truth,” Pappert said on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Pappert continued, saying, “I don’t know if they think they’re just protecting their friends at the federal level, but a new sheriff is in town. These people can all be heroes if they get out in front of this story and tell us how to prevent it from ever happening again, rather than cover for people like Christopher Wray.”
In the days following The Star’s filing of the Open Records Requests, it has since been reported that Abrego Garcia was transporting eight passengers from Houston, Texas to Temple Hills, Maryland, using a vehicle owned by an illegal immigrant who was convicted of human trafficking and deported from the U.S. to his country of origin, El Salvador.
Considering the latest information about the vehicle operated by Abrego Garcia and the crimes committed by its owner Pappert suggested that the continued slow walking of releasing materials related to the traffic stop of Abrego Garcia by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security is compromising “making it safer for people to live and work and drive in Tennessee.”
“This indicates that there is some sort of bizarre bias at the Tennessee Highway Patrol or the Department of Safety and Homeland Security that is not necessarily toward getting convictions and making it safer for people to live and work and drive in Tennessee, but instead toward ‘Let’s do what the FBI says, they’re the most important ones, and the federal government controls our funding anyway, so let’s just do what Biden wants and hope nothing bad comes from it’,” Pappert explained.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
