President Donald Trump with Attorney General Pam Bondi during a public safety roundtable at a Tennessee Air National Guard Base in Memphis. March 23, 2026. in Memphis, Tenn. Mark Schiefelbein/AP
President Donald Trump visited Memphis on Monday to praise a surge in federal law enforcement there, while some locals took to the streets to protest the surge.
“For years, our leaders allowed entire cities in America to be destroyed by crime, drugs, and gang violence,” he said during a roundtable discussion about the Memphis Safe Task Force, which launched in September. “Tolerating this violence was always a choice.”
Trump credited the task force—a collaboration of more than 30 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, and the subject of my recent Mother Jones investigation—with a substantial drop in crime in Memphis over last year. Officers have arrested more than 7,000 people.
But protesters say the task force also has changed daily life in less desirable ways. Police are riding around with immigration officers, who ask people of color for proof of citizenship. The law enforcement presence is so pervasive that immigrants have been sheltering at home, afraid to shop for groceries or bring their kids to school.
In November, I saw this firsthand during a visit. I hid in a dark apartment with terrified immigrant parents and their citizen children, who told me they didn’t go outside much anymore because they were scared of police. I also drove around town and talked to activists, business owners, cops, local politicians, teachers, volunteers, and ordinary people. One resident compared the vibe to 1930s Germany—helicopters circling overhead, National Guard patrolling downtown, unmarked law enforcement vehicles roaming the streets, and immigrant citizens carrying their US passports, lest they be detained.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, a Democrat who opposed the task force, speculated that crime—which had been a problem—was dropping at least in part because people weren’t venturing out nearly as much. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semiautomatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he told me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.”
Check out the full investigation here.
