Nashville Mayor Under Fire for Allegedly ‘Doxxing’ ICE Officers

Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell is coming under fire for allegedly “doxxing” federal agents who participated in immigration-enforcement actions in the Music City. He denies that was his intention, but the mayor now finds himself under a congressional microscope.

Executive Order 30

On May 9, after a joint ICE operation with the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) in which officers arrested more than 100 aliens, O’Connell amended Executive Order 30, “Communications Between Federal Immigration Authorities and the Metropolitan Government”.

As amended, that order requires all local police and fire department employees (and others) “who are reasonably likely to engage in” communications with “federal immigration authorities” (read: “ICE”) “or their parent agency, if regarding immigration” (read: “DHS”) to submit those communications “within one business day to the Mayor’s Office of New Americans”.

The “Mayor’s Office for New Americans” appears to be to a Metro Nashville entity also called the “Mayor’s Office of New and Indigenous Americans” (MONIA), which according to its website “is committed to advance [sic] policies anchored in equity, inclusion, and belonging, striving to create a better Nashville for all Nashvillians”.

The sole attachment under a “Helpful Resources” tab on the MONIA website is a link to “Executive Order 30 Open Data”, which summarizes communications between Nashville officers and officials and ICE but does not currently provide any personal identity information for any local or federal officer.

But it used to.

The Congressman vs. the Mayor

In mid-May, after that order was issued, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), called for an investigation into O’Connell and other lawmakers for their purported efforts to impede ICE operations in the city.

Ogles turned up the heat on O’Connell on May 30 after it was revealed that the “open data” link on the MONIA website had identified “individuals involved in … interactions” between Metro officials and immigration enforcement officials — that is, the names of the ICE officers and agents who spoke with the local cops (there’s a copy online, but I won’t replicate the damage by including it).

Once those disclosures were publicly reported, Metro Nashville “quietly remove[d]” the names from the database (though as noted the link can still be found), but the initial releases of the names prompted Ogles to take to X (Twitter) to complain:

During a June 18 press conference, Karen Aguilar from the local Fox affiliate pressed O’Connell on whether “posting the names of federal immigration officers endangers them”, an exchange Aguilar later released on X:

The mayor responded: “This is an issue where they were already a part of a public record by being in Department of Emergency Communications calls, so I don’t think it puts them in additional risk, but it’s also not an intention of the executive order under which those names are released”.

Aguilar then asked: “If it doesn’t put them in additional risk, why did your office decide to remove the names?”

O’Connell responded:

It wasn’t an intentional process. We’ve had, um, primarily using local departments, we’ve had multiple people whose names have been there, and this is something new, we’re reviewing it, we’ve obviously had some concerns from DHS about the release of those names. They would still be discoverable, but that was not the intent of the executive order.

Aguilar pressed O’Connell on whether he understood DHS’s concerns that the disclosure of the names “endanger[ed] federal immigration officers”, to which the mayor insisted that while he understood the concerns, releasing the names “was not doxxing”.

O’Connell later stated that it wasn’t an “endangerment process”, instead contending he was “far more concerned about the overall dynamic we have about unmarked, unidentifiable masked people whisking people into vehicles. I think that’s a bigger concern.”

Of course, the reason those “people” (ICE officers) are “unidentifiable” and “masked” is the danger that they will be identified and doxed — a legitimate concern given assaults on ICE officers are reportedly up more than four-fold.

Congressional Pushback

Linked in Ogles’ May 30 tweet is a letter from Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of the House Judiciary Committee, Mark Green (R-Tenn.) of the House Homeland Security Committee, Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, and Ogles in his position as chairman of the Congressional Counter-Terrorism Caucus.

In that letter, the chairmen alleged Executive Order 30 “could have a chilling effect on the ability of local law enforcement to communicate freely and candidly with federal immigration employees”.

As my colleague George Fishman recently explained, two separate provisions of federal law bar local officials from prohibiting “law enforcement officers, on a voluntary basis” from informing ICE about aliens “whom ICE has an interest in”.

If local Nashville cops are concerned about being called on the mayor’s carpet for talking to their law-enforcement colleagues at ICE, they’d likely be less likely to do so, and it’s questionable whether O’Connell could do indirectly what federal law bars him from doing explicitly.

Ominously, the chairmen also question whether the order could allow “Metro employees” to “use nonpublic information to warn criminal aliens of planned ICE enforcement operations”, and in fact (the letter noted) O’Connell’s “chief lawyer recently admitted that it was an ‘open question’ whether an individual could legally ‘announce in advance that there’s an impending enforcement activity’”.

Note that in a recent Pew Research poll, 50 percent of respondents approved of “using state and local law enforcement to help with federal efforts to deport people who are in the U.S. illegally”. Given that, the percentage who approve of local authorities giving wanted aliens a heads-up is likely much lower.

There’s a fine line between a jurisdiction refusing to cooperate in immigration enforcement and actively impeding it by disclosing the names of immigration officers and disclosing law-enforcement information. The ongoing congressional investigation should answer whether Mayor O’Connell crossed that line.