Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said he believes the Metro Nashville government, specifically Mayor Freddie O’Connell, realizes it is facing serious legal consequences as a result of its efforts to thwart federal immigration enforcement operations.
O’Connell, following an immigration enforcement operation conducted in Nashville earlier this month that resulted in the arrests of 196 criminal illegal aliens, has worked to shield illegal aliens from law enforcement by launching a “Belonging Fund” to “support immigrants in Nashville during moments of crisis” and by amending his Executive Order 30 to mandate that Metro Nashville employees report contacts with federal immigration officials to him and the Office of New Americans.
In the time after O’Connell amended his executive order, the Office of New Americans has since published the names of ICE, DHS, and HSA officials and their interactions with local agencies on its official Metro government website, which Tennessee lawmakers and federal officials have criticized as a move putting law enforcement agents in harm’s way.
On Wednesday night, after Fox 17 reported on the public data, the mayor’s office said it removed “any names mistakenly included in the information posted online.”
Pappert said the publishing of such data for public view seems like a “real managerial failure” and “a failure in oversight,” noting how the data also revealed names of multiple Metro Nashville Police Department officers.
“They did include names of Metro Nashville officers, which I thought was odd…It does seem as though this is a real managerial failure. It’s a failure in oversight. It seems as though they’re copying and pasting from a police report and simply putting it on the internet for the entire world to see,” Pappert explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“I wonder if they’re not going to try to throw some Metro Nashville police officers under the bus for this,” he added.
With regard to the mayor’s response via spokesman to the published data, Pappert pointed out how O’Connell seems to have deferred blame to his predecessor, former Mayor John Cooper, for creating Executive Order 30 to create such a database.
“He seems to know that he’s messed up here. Through a spokesman, he told Fox 17 in Nashville last night that the portion of the executive order that created this database, even though nobody had ever heard of it before like two weeks ago, actually dates back to 2019 and it was first enacted under former Mayor John Cooper,” Pappert said.
“In other words, Mayor O’Connell is saying, ‘This isn’t my fault. This isn’t my fault. This all existed before I was here’,” he added.
Pappert further said he believes the mayor and the Metro Nashville government “knows it’s in trouble” for its response to federal law enforcement operations amid the mayor’s silence on the matter.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
