FRANKLIN, Tennessee – At an event in Franklin, Tennessee on Sunday, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) praised Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s cooperation with federal authorities in the Memphis Safe Task Force effort, which has taken gang members off the streets and rescued missing children involved in trafficking. Young is a Democrat.
“He has been a pleasure to work with,” Blackburn said of Young. “He is truly concerned about the people of Memphis and he wants the city cleaned up.”
Blackburn spoke to media Sunday while backstage at the annual Boots and Jeans, BBQ & Beans event hosted by State Senator Jack Johnson. The Republican senator highlighted Young’s willingness to work with the Trump administration on crime-reduction efforts, drawing a sharp contrast with other Democrat elected officials who have resisted federal intervention.
The city of Memphis has a population of 600,000, and is part of Shelby County, which has a population of 900,000. Young is the mayor of the city of Memphis, which has its own police department. Shelby County also has a mayor, and has responsibility for operating the jails in the county. There are at times overlapping responsibilities between the two entities.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who declared a state of emergency in response to the federal action on Tuesday, has emerged as one of the most vocal local critics of the operation. At the press conference announcing the move, Harris invited Carlos Ochoa, an organizer with Vecindarios 901 – an immigration group affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America and Black Lives Matter – who described the task force as a “federal occupation” engaged in “terror” against illegal immigrants. Ochoa further called deportations of those without criminal convictions a “moral crisis.” Harris is also a Democrat.
Young, however, noted at Governor Lee’s press conference that those being arrested had an outsized impact on crime. “We want this effort to help us get those individuals off the streets, because we know that those are the significant drivers of violent crime in our city,” Young said, adding that about 10,000 felony warrants were outstanding in Memphis prior to the federal deployment.
The senator told The Tennessee Star that the first-of-its-kind operation has “been able to take about 1,200 gang members off the streets” and helped “rescue all of these children that were missing children.”
TBI Director Bill Rausch said in remarks to media on Tuesday that 45 missing children had been found so far in the course of the law enforcement action. The ongoing effort, authorities say, is seeking to locate some 92 additional identified missing children.
Blackburn, who has made the issue of missing migrant children a signature cause, linked the Memphis operations to a broader concern about unaccompanied minors.
“Where are these children?” she asked, referring to federal tracking of unaccompanied minors. “Department of Health and Human Services lost track of 350,000 children,” she said, citing figures that include both children who missed immigration court dates and those never given court dates.
She said that through the effort like the Memphis Safe Task Force, “we can rescue some of these children and pull them out of the sex trafficking.”
Rep. Tim Burchett, who was also present, praised Blackburn for confronting Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin on the missing children issue. “She called him out on this issue and he just basically said he’s never heard of it,” Burchett said. “This is the denial in the Democrat party.”
Blackburn and Durbin have clashed repeatedly over various issues, including Blackburn’s requests for subpoenas of Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs when Durbin chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee.
For his part, Mayor Young has evolved on the issue of federal deployment to Memphis, saying in September that he “did not ask for the National Guard” and didn’t think it was “the way to drive down crime,” though he acknowledged that decision had already been made.
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Michael Patrick Leahy is the founder and CEO of the Star News Network, which includes The Tennessee Star. Follow Leahy on X at @michaelpleahy.
Photo “Sen. Marsha Blackburn” by Marsha Blackburn.
