Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said that the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security’s continued slow walk of releasing information requested by The Star of the 2022 traffic stop in Putnam County of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) officers suggests that the state agency is participating in a cover up of Biden-era Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failures.
Last week, The Star was the first to report that Abrego Garcia, the citizen of El Salvador deported by the Trump administration last month, was suspected of being engaged in human trafficking during the 2022 traffic stop on I-40 in Tennessee; however, was let go at the time after the Biden-era 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.
In the days following The Star’s reporting on Abrego Garcia’s brief detainment during the 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, 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, Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, who himself was convicted of human trafficking and deported from the U.S. to his country of origin, El Salvador.
Hernandez Reyes was convicted in 2020 after he pleaded guilty to smuggling fellow illegal immigrants into the United States following a traffic stop in Mississippi.
“In the Abrego Garcia case, they said to release them. They said to take photographs and then release these people after about a two hour traffic stop. This flies in the face of the Mississippi traffic stop where the alleged boss, the person who owned the vehicle, was actually arrested, a Department of Homeland Security official was actually on the scene and made the determination after interviewing the people in the vehicle that there was human smuggling afoot, and that arrests needed to be made,” Pappert explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Considering the new details in Abrego Garcia’s case, especially questions surrounding why he was let go by THP at the direction of FBI while, in a similar circumstance, Hernandez Reyes was arrested and charged, Pappert said the Tennessee Department of Safety’s continued withholding of requested materials related to the 2022 traffic stop suggests that the state agency is engaged in an ongoing coverup of Biden-era FBI failures.
“I think one possibility is that there was a lot more cooperation between the Biden-era FBI and these Tennessee state agencies where they really report to a Republican governor. I think that they may be trying to prevent the people of Tennessee and the United States of America from learning exactly how bad Biden let things get and how much state agencies had to cooperate, or at least stand down, and let that happen,” Pappert said.
To the more pressing question of whether or not the Tennessee Department of Safety – lead by Administrator Jeff Long (pictured above) – was “aiding and abetting human trafficking” at the direction of the FBI telling THP to release Abrego Garcia, Pappert agreed.
“If they weren’t aiding and abetting illegal immigrants and human smuggling and human trafficking, then were they aiding and abetting the Biden administration as they allowed 15 million people into this country illegally, and now we can’t get them out,” Pappert said.
“If they weren’t aiding and abetting illegal immigrants and human smuggling and human trafficking, then were they aiding and abetting the Biden administration as they allowed 15 million people into this country illegally, and now we can’t get them out,” Pappert said.
Tune in now to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show – your AMERICA FIRST news talk!
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “TDS Administrator Jeff Long” by Tennessee Administrator Jeff Long.
