Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, is questioning the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security’s (TDOSHS) legal rationale for redacting requested information from the body and dash camera footage of the 2022 traffic stop of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) officers.
Last week, The Star received body camera footage as the result of an Open Records Request filed with TDOSHS, which revealed that THP officers discussed their suspicion that Abrego Garcia was hauling the nine other passengers in the vehicle “for money” during the November 30, 2022, traffic stop of the 2001 Chevrolet Suburban he was driving in Cookeville, Tennessee.
However, the materials received by The Star from TDOSHS included only the footage recorded by the THP trooper responsible for the stop despite at least one of the other troopers’ body-worn cameras being visible in the video.
TDOSHS also heavily redacted the audio corresponding to the trooper’s body-worn camera, removing large swathes of troopers’ questioning, Abrego Garcia’s responses, and law enforcement’s discussion from the video.
The traffic stop’s footage also notably omits other identifying information, including the vehicle’s license plate, which TDOSHS digitally blurred upon release to The Star.
Concerning TDOSHS blurring the vehicle’s license plate in the body camera footage, Pappert argued that license plates are publicly visible and not legitimately protected under privacy laws, especially since they were part of video evidence and not a request through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“[TDOSHS] is claiming there is a Tennessee state law that specifically prohibits anybody at a Department of Motor Vehicles from releasing any private information obtained by that agency in order to let a person drive on the roads,” Pappert explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Noting how TDOSHS cited both state and federal privacy laws tied to DMV records to justify withholding information, Pappert said he believes the “public interest” clause in public records laws should apply, particularly because Jorge Ramon Hernandez Reyes, a convicted human smuggler, owned the vehicle.
“There’s something in public records laws…called the public Interest. The fact is, we know who owns this vehicle because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security already told us it’s owned by this character Hernandez Reyes, who is a convicted human smuggler, citizen of El Salvador, deported in 2020. But they’re refusing, essentially, to confirm publicly available information using publicly available information, which is a license plate,” Pappert said.
“I think it is a very spurious thing to state that they cannot release it based on privacy laws,” Pappert added.
Pivoting to TDOSHS redacting portions of the audio in the footage, Pappert said he suspects the agency is hiding behind a vague reference to an “ongoing federal investigation,” which is not a valid exemption under Tennessee’s Public Records Act.
“If you’ve watched any of the body camera footage including what we put out, you’ll notice massive portions of audio are redacted. There is nothing in their explanation, the laws that they cited, that would explain all of these rampant omissions at all, whatsoever. The only thing that I could think that would explain it is that there is some sort of active and ongoing investigation,” Pappert explained.
Pappert further said he believes TDOSHS’ audio redactions and selective disclosure of only releasing one angle of footage, despite multiple officers being present at the scene of the traffic stop, may be part of a broader effort to avoid transparency.
“The Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security told us the Department of Justice at the federal level was investigating, but I think what happened is there is no exception within the Tennessee Public Records Act that would allow them to say, ‘a federal investigation is the reason we’re not redacting this.’ So they just redacted it and hoped we wouldn’t notice – the same reason they gave us one body camera angle and one dashboard camera footage when we asked for all of them, and there’s four or five officers at the scene,” Pappert said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
