The Tennessee Senate was scheduled to debate a bill Wednesday that would ban state and local governments from adopting sanctuary city policies that would interfere with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
That bill was re-referred Wednesday to the calendar committee along with another bill that would ban state and local officials from accepting consular IDs before the Sunday wine sales bill passed the senate.
Sen. Jeff Yarbro, D - Nashville, proposed an amendment to SB 2332 in light of the April 5 ICE raid at a Grainger County meat packing plant that involved 97 workers and detained 54 people believed to be undocumented workers living in the U.S. illegally.
The amendment would penalize employers that were found guilty of knowingly employing 'fifty or more illegal aliens' and force them to pay 'reasonable restitution' to the state, applicable local governments, as well as U.S. citizens affected by large-scale raids conducted by the Department of Homeland Security.
Matt Anderson, the Press Secretary for the Tennessee Senate Democratic Caucus, said the amendment is intended to recover costs from employers and allow restitution to be paid, in particular, to cover the costs for minors born as U.S. citizens left without parents who were working in the U.S. illegally.
"The point here is that if we have employers who go out of their way to hire a large number of undocumented workers to make an extra buck, we should be able to recover the costs from those employers for the devastation that’s left behind when we have an action like we saw in Grainger County," he said.
The House version of the bill was given approval in a House committee Tuesday. The bill would mandate local law enforcement to detain certain immigrants in cooperation with federal enforcement.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, issue detainers to ask local law enforcement officials to detain immigrants for purposes of deportation.
Such detainers are not mandatory requirements but Terry Ashe, executive director of the Tennessee Sheriffs' Association, said they are followed.
“We’re going to enforce those detainers,” he said.
When asked by Rep. Bill Sanderson, R-Kenton, if the current detainer system is working, Ashe said it was.
But proponents of the legislation said it was necessary in order to avoid issues seen in other states. Rep. Tim Rudd, R-Murfreesboro, cited California as an example. Sheriffs in the Golden State have said they are not willing to fulfill the ICE detainer requests.
A significant portion of the committee's discussion Tuesday focused on whether the ICE detainers ran afoul of the 4th Amendment, which guarantees the right against unreasonable search and seizure.
Unlike criminal detainers or warrants, ICE detainers can be issued without a standard of proof or probable cause, warned opponents of the bill, including the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.
But Rep. William Lamberth, R-Cottontown, disagreed, saying he thought the process for issuing detainers was similar to what happens in local courts every day.
After Rep. Jason Powell, D-Nashville, tried to amend the bill to address the 4th Amendment issues, Matt Munday, the committee's legal analyst, said Reedy's legislation did raise "constitutional issues."
As the committee continued to consider the measure, Rep. Johnny Shaw, D-Bolivar, said he was convinced that no one on the committee knew what they were talking about and the panel was wasting taxpayer money.
Shaw also said he worried that the legislation could lead to racial profiling.
"If this legislation passes in the form that it’s in, it will give people the right do more (profiling)," he said.
Beyond the concerns outlined Tuesday, the committee previously heard from Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of TIRRC, who said the legislation could potentially lead to legal action against local law enforcement agencies.
Teatro warned the bill was "begging for a lawsuit."
Despite the various concerns about the bill, the committee ultimately approved a slightly amended version of Reedy's legislation with a voice vote, sending it the the House finance committee.
After the committee's vote, TIRRC said in a statement the organization was concerned about the legal, practical and moral implications of the legislation.
"We remain hopeful that House members will talk to their local police and sheriffs, recognize the bill's many problems, and stop it from advancing further," said Lisa Sherman-Nikolaus, TIRRC's policy director.