A lot has happened in the news, in the world, and in our own Memphis community. Kristi Noem’s firing as Secretary of Homeland Security was welcome news to those who bristled at her flat yet aggressive affect — void of emotion, apology, understanding, or basic humanity. We knew her tenure in the cabinet was coming to a close when her ICE force detained and transported the 5-year-old with the blue bunny hat, Liam Conejo, from Minneapolis to Texas. She described Renée Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists and wouldn’t apologize, though no one thought Liam, Renée, or Alex constituted the “worst of the worst.”
What is a little worse for wear since September is our own city of Memphis. The pandemic revealed that the economic growth and innovation we were experiencing was tenuous. The city has felt as though it is plodding forward through a funk in recent years, despite major issues like violent crime falling considerably since 2024.
There’s a sense the city has lost its spark or chispa recently, with restaurants closing, IKEA bailing on us, and layoffs at major employers like FedEx and Nike. Even our schools are closing (five of them next year), which reflects both a population decline and a community without sufficient resources to fund capital investments. Our population has shrunk by about 4.5 percent since the last nationwide census in 2020. Not good news.
President Trump told us during the February State of the Union Address what a “big success” his deployment of the National Guard to our city has been; he said he “restore[d] law and order to our most dangerous cities, including Memphis.” The president brought his circus to our still struggling Memphis last week to remind us how he has saved us — he is desperate for any type of win these days.
Memphians never asked for his task force of 13 federal agencies, including ICE and the National Guard, to come here in the first place. The governor asked for the forces, the city mayor mostly collaborated, the county mayor got angry and sued, and the police chief reported last October that the city was indeed collaborating with ICE.
But what has been the cost of this federal surge? MLK50: Justice Through Journalism reported that of the 3,000 people arrested in the first two months of the Task Force’s efforts, only 6 percent appeared white. A Daily Memphian analysis showed that 87.6 percent of the Force’s 662 immigration-related arrests between October and December began with traffic (read pretextual) stops.
This disproportionate attack on minority and immigrant communities has left the city shaken. Anecdotally, we know many Latino families are keeping their kids out of school and considering moving to other locations where they can work, attend school and church, and live away from the fear of ICE’s reach.
The immigrant community and its investment in our city are critical to Memphis’ resurgence. This is a community who plays an outsized role in the construction and service sectors that keep our city moving. This is a community that, while representing only 5.2 percent of the Memphis metropolitan area, has significant influence on our economy.
Current data is hard to come by but even a decade ago, undocumented immigrants were contributing $61.5 million in taxes, exercised more than $350 million in spending power, and contributed $4.2 billion to the Memphis area GDP. Immigrants are over 25 percent more likely to be entrepreneurs than those who are born in the United States. These numbers, of course, shed little light on their cultural contributions.
Given our current downward economic trend, the community receives no benefit from the federal government attacking our immigrant neighbors. Indeed, we think most Memphians would welcome more of their influence and less from outsiders like the state senator from Eads, Brent Taylor, who wields power over a city that wants nothing to do with him.
We face real challenges going forward in Memphis. These challenges were not created by the likes of Kristi Noem or even Brent Taylor, but the way past them is by uniting. We choose Memphis.
We need and deserve the kind of locally focused leadership that pulls us together — all of us — without separating and arresting us based on the language we speak or the color of our skin or the neighborhood we live in.
Bryce W. Ashby is an attorney at Donati Law, PLLC. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.
