On October 16, 2025, David Kustoff spent a day riding along with President Trump's Memphis Safe Task Force. Then he called Fox News and said he wanted it to never end.

"Because of the local law enforcement numbers being down, it makes sense to have a stronger federal law enforcement presence," Kustoff told Fox News Digital. He said he would work with state officials and the Trump administration "to make sure that, on a permanent basis, we have extra federal law enforcement once this task force sees its completion."

He went further. He said Memphis should be the model for everybody else.

"This is a blueprint, what is being done in Memphis, for other big cities across the country. And I would think that any mayor and any governor who has a problem with crime in their communities would welcome such an effort."

Ten months later, NPR went and looked at what the blueprint actually built. It is not what Kustoff sold.

The task force was announced as an anti-crime operation. It became an immigration dragnet.

Trump authorized the Memphis Safe Task Force on September 15, 2025. He called it a "replica" of the operation in Washington, D.C., and said it would focus on "dangerous career criminals." Immigration enforcement was never mentioned as a goal — not by federal officials, not by local ones.

That is not how it went. NPR reviewed arrest data and talked to lawyers, immigrants and community members across ten months of the operation, and found something different: the flood of federal agents into Memphis produced widespread immigration arrests, a majority of them of people with no criminal convictions, according to a data analysis by the Institute for Public Service Reporting.

The first months of the task force brought hundreds of immigration arrests — a sixfold jump over the months before it. And most of the arrests the task force made overall, immigration or otherwise, were for nonviolent offenses, according to the city's own data.

The way they were made matters. Most of the operation ran on traffic stops.

"That's been the main way that families have been separated," Maria Oceja, co-founder of the local rapid-response network Vecindarios 901, told NPR. In the first months, she said, law enforcement was "pulling people over left and right." Her group's hotline got so many calls that four people had to answer it at once, all night, for months.

Hunter Demster, a Memphis resident who films task force activity, told NPR the stops were concentrated in the city's two main Hispanic neighborhoods. "It was very evident that this was an immigration operation at its core," he said. "This isn't necessarily about finding the worst of the worst or fixing crime. It's about targeting Black and brown folk."

What it did to Kustoff's own city

Kustoff told Fox News that people in Memphis "do appreciate the presence of the law enforcement and the National Guard," and that agents told him strangers were walking up to thank them and hug them. "That's the Memphis way, that's the Southern way, that's the Tennessee way," he said.

Here is the other Memphis way, as described by people who live there:

• "There was a spike of fear and panic," said Mauricio Calvo, who runs Latino Memphis. "Kids were not going to school, people were not showing up to work. We were getting calls from medical providers saying people were not coming in."
• Volunteers set up food pantries in their garages to deliver groceries to families too afraid to go out.
• One woman's group started a Facebook channel just to tell people which routes were safest to drive.

And there is Yasser Lopez. He was 18, a junior at Memphis Business Academy, brought to the United States from Nicaragua as a child, with no criminal convictions. In February he was riding as a passenger in a car on the way to a soccer game. Memphis police stopped the car. Immigration agents followed. He was held without bond for 63 days.

His classmates walked out of school over it. A federal judge eventually ordered him released, finding his arrest and detention had violated his due process rights.

"I do not want children pulled from cars and out of schools," Ronnie Davis, a barber in the Frayser neighborhood, told NPR. Davis says he feels safer with the extra law enforcement around. He also said this: "But had I been Hispanic, I'd be terrified. If I was Haitian, I'd be terrified."

The crime emergency was already ending on its own

Kustoff's whole case for a permanent federal presence rests on an emergency. He told Fox News the crime rate in Memphis "really exacerbated" under Biden.

Crime in Memphis has been falling since 2023, when it hit a near-record high. By the time Trump launched the task force in the fall of 2025, crime in the city was at a 25-year low. Even the Fox News story carrying Kustoff's quotes noted that the Memphis Police Department had reported a significant drop over the first eight months of 2025 — before any of this started.

Crime has kept going down since. Trump flew to Memphis in March 2026 and declared it "fixed." What nobody has shown is that the troops are the reason for a decline that started two years before they arrived. When NPR asked the White House about the immigration side of the task forces, a spokesperson replied that they had "yielded tremendous results" — and, NPR noted, listed those results without providing evidence.

The task force does not have an end date.

Nobody in Memphis got a vote on this

The one thing that made Memphis different from Chicago or Minneapolis is that the state government was on board. Gov. Bill Lee sent in hundreds of Tennessee National Guard troops in October 2025 at Trump's request — not at the request of anyone in Memphis.

Seven state and local Democratic officials, led by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, sued to stop it. In November a Davidson County judge temporarily blocked the deployment, ruling the plaintiffs were likely to prove Lee had violated the Tennessee Military Code.

Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal wrote that "the power committed to the Governor as commander-in-chief of the Army and the Militia is not unfettered." She noted that Lee never issued an official order — he put out a press release after Trump signed a memo — and that the Tennessee legislature never voted to send the Guard to Memphis, which state law requires. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had already sent Lee a letter saying the Guard would be funded to stay through September 2026.

The troops stayed anyway. In April 2026 the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled for the governor — but not because the deployment was lawful. The panel never reached that question. It held that the elected officials who sued couldn't prove they'd been harmed, so they had no standing to ask.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, said he was not "supportive" of the immigration arrests but couldn't do anything about them. "There's no mayor in America that can control the immigration aspects of this," he said.

That is the actual blueprint Kustoff is recommending to every other city in America: the president decides, the governor signs off, the city it happens to gets no say, and the courts find nobody has standing to object.

He wants it permanent. He won't hold a town hall.

Kustoff was born in Memphis and told Fox News he has lived in the area his entire life. He is asking for a permanent armed federal presence there. He is not asking the people who live there what they think.

In late March 2025, Tennessee Lookout columnist Mark Harmon noted that Kustoff's scheduled event at Our Lady of Perpetual Help was cancelled over what were described as security concerns — after the Germantown Democratic Club planned a sign-waving protest outside. Steve Cohen, the Democrat next door in the 9th District, held a town hall that drew 750 people.

This is a pattern with this crowd, not a one-off. When federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Arizona's Eli Crane's response was to demand the military be sent in. And the surveillance machinery pointed at people who criticize ICE online is something Congress paid for — Kustoff included.

Kustoff got his day riding along. He got the photo op, the Fox News hit, and the numbers the task force handed him — 45 missing children recovered, more than 900 arrests. What he did not get, and did not go looking for, was the part NPR found: the neighborhoods that emptied out, the kids who stopped going to school, the 18-year-old held for 63 days over a ride to a soccer game.

He wants that permanent.

Source

In Memphis, an 'anti-crime' task force quietly turned into an ICE crackdown — Kat Lonsdorf, NPR, July 27, 2026. Photo: National Guard members on Beale Street, July 17, 2026 (George Walker IV/AP).