Leer este artículo en español. Late on the night of May 3, near the intersection of Edmondson and Nolensville pikes, a Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper pulled over a Chevrolet HHR with a light out. The trooper approached the vehicle and, in an upbeat tone, asked, “Hey, how are you?” “I’m fine, man,” said Eduardo, a chatty man in a red USA sweatshirt. Then, as seen in a 31-minute body camera video, Eduardo offered that he was going home and knew he had a broken light. After being asked, he openly acknowledged that he was not a U.S. citizen. (The Banner is using only first names to protect the privacy of those deported and their families remaining in Nashville.) The trooper took that information to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent waiting in the trooper’s car. The ICE agent then approached the Chevrolet, asking Eduardo questions about his immigration status, which Eduardo answered freely. At certain points in the video — which was originally obtained by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and reviewed by the Banner — the audio is redacted, including when the trooper was alone in his vehicle and during some of his interactions with other ICE agents. It wasn’t until the ICE agent mentioned the word “immigration” and said he would be detaining Eduardo that the 59-year-old’s demeanor changed. His despair was visible. “Didn’t you enter the country illegally, correct?” the ICE agent asked. “Yeah, pero my family is here,” Eduardo said. “Everybody’s here.” “OK, I get that,” the ICE agent said with a laugh, “but, you know, you’re not here legally, so we’re going to take you into custody.” This is a condensed version of the traffic stop and arrest of Eduardo by THP and ICE on May 3, 2025. We have provided captions to the best of our ability. THP has redacted the identities of state and federal law enforcement. Eduardo spent the next several minutes staring despondently at the ground, hunched over, occasionally swaying with labored breathing. More federal agents had arrived by then. They put Eduardo’s phone and necklace in a bag and moved his car to an empty parking space. He was transferred to federal custody, setting in motion a cascade of events, with repercussions that continue today. He was six minutes from home. Eduardo’s encounter with THP came during the early hours of a weeklong joint operation in which THP troopers pulled over hundreds of vehicles in Nashville, resulting in more than 100 arrests and upending the lives of both those detained and family members left behind. The operation, though singular in some ways, was part of a broader national trend under the second Trump administration. Before January 2025, more than 23 percent of people detained by ICE in Tennessee had a conviction for aggravated felony, according to analysis by Lighthouse Reports. Since, that figure has dropped to 11 percent. The share of those arrested without even minor traffic violations on their record has grown from 42 percent to 66 percent. Of the 151 arrested during the THP operation and able to be identified by Lighthouse Reports, just 23 were aggravated felons and 40 total had criminal records, with the most common past conviction driving under the influence. Related: ‘Huntin’ Time’ – How ICE and Tennessee State Troopers Targeted Immigrants, Inflated Safety Claims Eduardo told the Banner that, in the nine months since he was detained in Nashville, he has faced poor conditions in custody, hunger, illness and an inability to communicate with loved ones. When he finally made it to Monterrey, Mexico, where he now lives with his brother, he barely recognized his hometown. “When I came in and saw Monterrey as I entered the city, everything looked very different, there were many huge buildings,” Eduardo said. “At first I didn’t even know what neighborhoods were which or what the city was, because it’s grown a lot toward the outskirts.” He had been flown from the United States to Mexico City and given funds for a bus ticket to Monterrey. Because he wasn’t able to contact family before making the journey, Eduardo arrived in Monterrey unannounced. He eventually found his way to an aunt’s house, where he was able to get in touch with his younger brother. Though he has decades of experience in construction in the Nashville area, Eduardo has struggled to find work in Monterrey. He keeps in touch with his extended family, including his three grandchildren in Nashville, on video calls. “Being deported feels awful,” Eduardo said on a video call, sporting a shirt from a Nashville contractor for whom he worked. “It’s not so much being deported, it’s what you go through. Before, I remember, people would be deported really quickly. You weren’t imprisoned, or anything like that. Just deported and sent back. Not now. Now detention centers are pure death for people.” Eduardo’s story is one of hundreds that started during the THP’s May stop spree. The Banner contacted those deported to El Salvador, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Jamaica, Mexico and beyond; their family members remaining in Nashville; and U.S. citizens caught up in the operation to better understand the role of the highway patrol and the experiences of those detained. They recalled experiencing suspected profiling, poor conditions in detention, arduous journeys and lingering financial and personal struggles in the months since the May operation. Dozens more could not be identified or reached. The night of The trooper who stopped Eduardo early in his shift saw an opportunity in the Edmondson Pike apartment complex where he pulled Eduardo over. “This is a good apartment complex,” the trooper told an ICE agent. “I’m just going to sit on it all night. The traffic coming out of here is ridiculous.” The complex is in the heart of a predominantly Latino neighborhood. In other videos reviewed by the Banner, federal agents flag specific businesses, like Plaza Mariachi, a cultural hub for the Latino community, as landmarks for the operation. In the footage, troopers were typically quick to release drivers who appeared white or Black and spoke with an American accent. Other drivers stopped by THP that week told the Banner that their experiences appeared to be profiling. A map that shows Tennessee Highway Patrol stops in relation to the areas of Davidson County with a significant percentage of Latino residents. Nazanin, a U.S. citizen of Middle Eastern descent, was pulled over on Harding Place early on the morning of May 10, as the operation was wrapping up, and given a citation for driving on a suspended license. At a hearing six months later, on Nov. 7, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the charge because her license had since been reinstated. After the hearing, she told the Banner that officers said they pulled her over for going 60 miles per hour. But she knew that was untrue because she had recently seen other law enforcement vehicles pulling people over, and she was watching her speed. “I literally just saw the police, so there’s no way I would be going that fast,” she said. “So I feel like that was just kind of a cap.” In the end, they didn’t give her a speeding ticket — which lines up with a pattern the Banner found from reviewing 52 hours of footage from the operation: Many citizens who were stopped for traffic violations were released without citations once law enforcement officers realized those drivers could not be detained by ICE, despite THP’s early claims that the operation was focused on traffic safety. Nazanin, who was born and raised in Nashville, said her stop lasted between 20 and 30 minutes and that observers at the gas station where she was pulled over filmed the encounter and expressed concern for her well-being, presumably assuming her to be part of the ICE operation. “I remember people talking about [ICE arrests that week],” she said. “A lot of people were even coming up to me trying to see if I was OK when I was at the gas station.” Aldingo, who was pulled over early on the morning of May 6, told the Banner that “there was definitely a lot of profiling going on.” He said he spent several hours in the back of a van after he was detained, observing as state and federal agents conducted more traffic stops and loaded more people into the van. “They drove up and down the street,” he recalled in an interview from Jamaica. “Once they saw an older vehicle, like anything from 2000 to 2010, they pull up and stop that vehicle. The moment they are produced with an American driver’s license, the state trooper drove off. He’s no longer interested [in] whether or not there was any form of violation.” Aldingo said troopers did not inform him of any specific traffic violation and that later he overheard an agent say to “just make something up” on a booking form that asked for a reason for the stop. “I had no traffic tickets, no traffic violation, no arrests, no criminal history, nothing whatsoever,” he told the Banner. “It was just a case where they were trying to rack up numbers. … It was just some type of metrics to them, like they’re just trying to meet some sort of quota.” Ana, whose son Selvin was detained in May, didn’t know why he never returned from a trip to the store that night. The next day, she visited a police precinct and said they suggested she check the federal immigration facility on Brick Church Pike, by then a gathering place of protesters and family members searching for lost loved ones. Her son was bused to Louisiana that day. Eduardo said his elderly mother was also left wondering about his whereabouts. He had left home to get gas and expected to return quickly. It wasn’t until the next day that he was able to call his mom to let him know he had been detained. ‘Where are you? Are you in Tennessee?’ he remembered her asking. But by then, he was already in a detention center in Louisiana. Detention Aldingo lived in Nashville for just two years, working as a line cook and dishwasher at high-end restaurants. But he never planned to live in the U.S. long-term. So, when he was detained last May, it wasn’t as disruptive. He has since settled back into life in Jamaica. But some of the people Aldingo met along the way were not as fortunate. They came from all over, he said, including Latin America, Armenia, Russia, China and France. A man he met in the van shortly after being detained was married to a U.S. citizen and was in the process of securing documentation, he said. In detention in Louisiana, Aldingo said he witnessed multiple suicide attempts. “We’ve seen persons dive off the top bunk trying to kill themselves,” he said. “Persons have been detained and put in isolation because they’re attempting to kill themselves. You genuinely have persons who cannot go home or refuse to go home because of the conditions that they’re facing back home. We’ve seen it. We’ve even seen hunger strikes. … We woke up one of the mornings, there was a trail of blood. … You see a lot of things.” In addition to safety or political concerns, Aldingo said his fellow detainees’ despair was economic. A Nepali detainee Aldingo met told him that his family back home had sold land and took out loans to get him to the U.S., and he wanted to kill himself “because he can’t go back home.” “I’d already planned to move back,” Aldingo said. “It was only a matter of being sent back unexpectedly. So for me, it was not a big deal as for others. I was in there with others who were like, ‘I can’t go home.’ They have so much on the line. They have nothing to return to.” Aldingo described the conditions in detention as “really, really overcrowded.” That’s part of why he immediately requested a “voluntary departure” to Jamaica. It took about six weeks for him to complete the process. Others were in detention for several months, like Eduardo, who said he lost weight and worked, himself, to keep the facility clean, asking guards for supplies. An image of Selvin while he was in detention. Credit: Submitted photo Selvin — who was detained during the THP sweep, released on bond and then rearrested and deported — said he developed a skin infection while in detention that he is still recovering from in El Salvador. He said he was frequently hungry during those initial 24 hours in Nashville, at the immigration detention facility in Louisiana and during a stay in Williamson County custody after his second arrest. (Arrest documents allege that Selvin had meth on him at the time of the second arrest, but he adamantly denies the charge and said he has never used meth.) “They wouldn’t give us food or water, saying we didn’t deserve it, that we were illegal and they didn’t want illegals, that nobody was going to complain or anything,” Selvin said. “We were all afraid something would happen to us. “Every night I cried and said, ‘Lord, take me out of here.’” Eduardo’s most vivid memories are of his fellow detainees in pain. He said he would often help feed elderly people who lacked the strength to feed themselves. On occasion, he wore protective gloves as recommended by the medical staff. “There were many sick people, and they wouldn’t get any help there,” he said. “They’d give them a Tylenol or an Advil. People who were epileptic, nothing.” The months since The deportations that followed the May THP/ICE operation tore holes through the city’s fabric. In the immigrant community, the constant sense of the threat of a similar operation keeps people from leaving home unnecessarily. In the immediate aftermath, Nashville businesses lost workers who feared venturing out. Churches saw attendance drop. Community groups struggled to provide support. Months later, families are still struggling — those picking up the pieces in Nashville and those forced to rebuild their lives in their home countries. Bills have gone unpaid, and families remain apart, missing each other across borders they cannot cross. Based on his two years working in hospitality in Nashville, Aldingo said immigrants like him keep the city running. “Nashville’s economy is structured on the immigrants and the tourists,” he said. “I’ve worked in several restaurants or several hotels inside of Nashville, and there’s hardly any citizens. It’s really jobs that the U.S. citizens don’t want. It’s going to be mostly immigrants there.” He said that federal immigration enforcement was a frequent topic of conversation in the kitchens where he worked, including on the night of his detention. At work the night he was detained, Aldingo said he and a coworker discussed an article about the arrests before he left on his ill-fated trip home. “You see these things happening, you’re like, ‘That’s not going to happen to me,’” Aldingo said. He first came to Nashville because his wife was pregnant, and he wanted to earn more money to support their child than he could in Jamaica. Beyond the financial strains and workforce depletion in the city, the detentions of longtime Nashvillians have inflicted deep emotional wounds on families. Those deported to Venezuela, El Salvador and Mexico