When Reggie Williams turned 18 two decades ago, his mother entrusted him with his birth certificate. Keep it on you at all times, she advised, in case you encounter police.
On a recent afternoon, he had a copy in his wallet, along with his state ID, as he walked from his uptown apartment in Memphis, Tennessee, to a nearby corner store.
A Memphis Police Department cruiser pulled up, and two officers questioned him: Where was he coming from? Where was he going?
Williams responded, and the interrogation continued: Did he have any weapons on him? No. Any drugs? No. When asked to empty his pockets, the 39-year-old artist turned over his wallet and phone.
Minutes later, four men poured out of an unmarked SUV with tinted windows. They carried rifles and wore body armor — but no identifying badges.
He thought of his family. “Deep down, I felt like I was not gonna make it home,” said Williams, who is Black.
The Oct. 15 incident occurred about two weeks after the National Guard and 30 other local, state and federal agencies descended upon Memphis as part of President Donald Trump’s order authorizing “hypervigilant policing” to end violent crime. In addition to targeting violent criminals, the operation dubbed “Memphis Safe Task Force” has ensnared innocent residents of this majority-Black city.
Among those who have reported being harassed: a ride-share driver stopped for not wearing a seat belt despite having one on as she drove a passenger to the airport; a pastor pulled over for looking lost as she left a church gathering; and, in a case of mistaken identity, a 72-year-old man roused from bed and marched out of his apartment while clad in only his robe and underwear.
None of these people were ultimately ticketed or arrested. But they told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica that they feared for their safety during what they described as indiscriminate and intimidating police encounters. While none of the law enforcement agencies involved responded to specific questions about these residents’ experiences, the news organizations corroborated their accounts using contemporaneous text messages and social media posts, as well as interviews with neighbors and relatives.
“I really believe that if I didn’t have that birth certificate, I would be somewhere in a facility,” said Williams, recalling one of the armed federal agents approaching him aggressively to ask if he was from Ethiopia or Ghana. “If you’re not white, we’re just all going to be targeted.”
When the Memphis police returned Williams’ wallet, the officer cautioned him: Don’t do anything bad and keep your ID on you. That warning, said Williams, who posted about the stop on Facebook, echoes a slavery-era requirement that free African Americans carry “freedom papers,” official court documents to prove they weren’t enslaved lest they be returned to bondage by slave patrols or law enforcement.
The U.S. Marshals Service, which leads the task force, did not respond to specific questions about Williams’ experience but disputed accounts of Black residents being harassed.
“The suggestion that our federal law enforcement officers are racially profiling citizens is not founded in reality and undermines the credibility and safety of the Task Force Officers who should be commended for the exceptional work they are doing to keep this community safe!” Ryan Guay, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service, said in a written statement.
“The Memphis Safe Task Force remains focused on its mission to make Memphis safer by removing violent offenders from our streets,” he said.
The Memphis Police Department did not respond to requests for comment about Williams’ encounter.
The U.S. Marshals Service told MLK50 and ProPublica that the task force does not track the number of stops law enforcement agencies have made since they surged into the city or how many of those stops resulted in citations or arrests. Nor does it track the racial demographics of the people stopped or arrested, a spokesperson said.
With spotty data, the task force’s operations remain opaque, making it difficult to capture a complete picture of its work. MLK50 obtained an Oct. 13 task force summary of its first two weeks of activity showing more than 1,500 personnel — just under half of whom are city and county law enforcement — on the ground, making 854 arrests and issuing 4,160 traffic citations. An MLK50 analysis of one day’s worth of arrest records obtained by the news organization found that nearly three quarters of the 51 people arrested Oct. 13 were not charged with a violent crime.
The task force said it has made 1,744 arrests as of Oct. 29, though it did not specify how many of those were related to violent crimes.
Democratic mayors and governors have vocally resisted Trump’s move to deploy the military against residents of Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon. In Memphis, Mayor Paul Young has said he opposes the deployment of the National Guard but has tried to cast the federal insurgence as an opportunity to strengthen the Memphis Police Department’s crime-fighting efforts. Memphis, which has a history of aggressive policing, reported a record high of 428 homicides in 2023, but crime overall had dipped to a 25-year-low earlier this year.
“Before the federal task force came to Memphis, we were already making strides to bring violent crime down,” Young, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We are pushing for the federal task force to remain focused on violent crime.”
Free the 901, a campaign supported by more than 20 community organizations, hosts weekly press conferences to share how the deployment is affecting residents and has joined protests to oppose the militarization of the city. At one demonstration, a Black Hawk helicopter circled overhead, reviving concerns that law enforcement was surveilling residents engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment.
Across the city, residents have reported a pattern: Tennessee Highway Patrol initiates a traffic stop, then federal agents roll in.
That’s what happened to Alandria London, a ride-share driver, as she was taking a passenger to the airport on Oct. 8. Wary of the heavy police presence in the area, she said she drove extra cautiously. A Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper on a motorcycle pulled her over anyway.
As soon as the officer approached the car he said, “Oh, I didn’t see your seat belt,” London recalled. He told her he needed to “call it in,” then let her go without asking for her driver’s license. She said a white van with “Immigration” written on the side pulled up behind the motorcycle; she suspected the officer had stopped her after mistaking her ethnicity.
“I do think that I was profiled. I think they were looking for someone of Hispanic descent,” said London, who is Black and posted about her experience on Facebook that afternoon along with a photo of herself wearing a seat belt. “After this incident, I could see why people should stay home, to stay out of the line of fire and move smart.”
Neither the Tennessee Highway Patrol nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to questions about London’s experience.
Despite the task force’s stated focus on violent crime, a fifth of arrests made in the first two weeks were related to immigration, data obtained by MLK50 shows. Brady McCarron, a U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson, would not give an updated number of immigration-related arrests but responded in an email that “while all the work completed by the Task Force is very important, we remain focused on the violent crime within the City of Memphis.”
Community organizers say many Hispanic residents are changing their daily patterns for fear of being detained: Patients are skipping doctors’ appointments, and parents are keeping their children home from school. Prior to the task force, Vecindarios 901, an immigrant resource organization, typically logged about 15 calls and messages a day reporting law enforcement sightings to its hotline. The group says it now logs around 120 per day.
To prepare residents for the influx of police, community organizations shared on social media a list of best practices: Avoid making eye contact with law enforcement, don’t argue in public and steer clear of highly patrolled areas. Memphians appeared to heed the last warning, prompting the city’s tourism agency to encourage people to return to downtown restaurants, museums and other businesses.
Appearing in Memphis on Oct. 1 to launch the task force, U.S. homeland security adviser Stephen Miller told hundreds of law enforcement officers gathered before him that they were “unleashed.”
“The handcuffs that you’re carrying, they’re not on you anymore. They’re on the criminals,” Miller bellowed as he stood in an East Memphis warehouse, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Whatever you need to get it done, we’re gonna get it done.”
Miller’s comments alarmed many residents and community organizers, especially coming shortly after the last two Memphis police officers involved in the fatal beating of Tyré Nichols, an unarmed Black man, in a 2023 traffic stop were released on bail. (The men were acquitted on state charges related to the death but are still facing federal prosecution.) The former officers were part of a special unit focused on violent crime that was disbanded after Nichols’ death.
A subsequent U.S. Department of Justice investigation found that Memphis police have a pattern of escalating encounters involving low-level offenses, using unjustified force, and making unconstitutional stops and unlawful arrests. Memphis police treated Black residents more harshly than white ones engaged in similar conduct, the Justice Department said. Trump’s Department of Justice withdrew the report and closed the investigation, characterizing Biden-era scrutiny of civil rights violations by law enforcement as a “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments.”
After Nichols’ death, the Memphis City Council banned the police from stopping drivers for minor infractions like broken taillights to search for more serious violations, but Tennessee’s Republican-led legislature passed a bill last year that undid the city ordinance. Now, those same types of traffic stops, called pretextual stops, have become a major part of the task force’s activities in Memphis, according to MLK50 and ProPublica’s review of more than three dozen affidavits of people arrested as part of task force operations.
ELaura James Reid, pastor of Coleman Chapel CME Church, said she was pulled over by a man driving an unmarked SUV with a matte army green finish as she was leaving her denomination’s unity summit at an East Memphis hotel on Oct. 10. She’d seen a car like it in the hotel parking lot with a National Guard license plate on the back.
The man, wearing camouflage fatigues, approached James Reid’s window and told her he stopped her because she looked lost.
James Reid, 49 and a lifelong Memphian, had been to the hotel many times before, including for annual ecumenical meetings. When she informed the man she was not lost, he said she looked like she was “driving unsure.”
James Reid didn’t know what that meant. She’d stopped at the stop sign. And she’d signaled her left turn.
The man asked for her license, but James Reid, a former schoolteacher who is familiar with the National Guard’s role in natural disasters, said she had a question for him first: Was it normal for National Guard members to ask for residents’ licenses when they go to cities to help people? In response, she said, he told her to have a nice day and to be safe.
Kealy Moriarty, a spokesperson for the Tennessee National Guard, did not respond to specific questions about the incident, including what “driving unsure” looks like, but said it is not conducting traffic stops. The military branch is “supporting the U.S. Marshals Service and multiple local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force,” Moriarty said. “Tennessee Guardsmen and women are currently assisting with tasks such as community safety patrols, site security, and traffic control in support of ongoing efforts to reduce crime and promote public safety in Memphis.”
Residents interviewed for this article said it was at times unclear which agencies’ officers were stopping them. Across the city, reporters have witnessed officers patrolling without badges or uniforms that identify their agencies.
When law enforcement officers do not identify their agencies while making stops, residents can’t demand accountability, civil rights advocates say. “This is way more than a police operation,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, a local criminal justice reform organization. “This is a power grab and a rapid erosion of your civil liberties.”
James Reid, who spoke about the incident to members of her congregation, said her experience counters the task force’s stated mission of targeting violent crimes.
“I don’t feel safe,” said James Reid, who is Black. “It fits into the narrative of keeping us in our place. I don’t think it fits the narrative of stopping violent criminals, unless you driving down the street is considered violent.”
To lower crime for good, governments must invest in violence interruption programs, public education and access to mental health care — not just policing, said James Reid and several Democratic state legislators and local politicians.
Some Memphis residents living in high-crime neighborhoods said they welcome the increased policing to make their communities safer.
“It’s good they’re here. Traffic is a lot lighter, and hopefully things will get better,” said Ann Morris, a 61-year-old bartender. Morris, who is Black, said she hopes it will serve as a “wake-up call” to the young men in the city.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican who welcomed the federal intervention, has said that while “the surge will diminish at some point,” the task force’s operations and collaboration between organizations “will last forever.” Lee’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
“If they’re not a criminal element, then they shouldn’t be afraid,” Lee said at the Oct. 14 news conference.
But staying out of trouble does not protect residents from nerve-racking police encounters.
Just days after the task force was deployed to Memphis, Phillip Lewis was awakened by loud knocks and the doorbell. The 72-year-old yelled for whoever was at the door to hold on as he put a robe over his underwear and walked slowly across his South Memphis apartment. Cancer has taken the 6-foot-6-inch-tall former high school basketball standout from 185 pounds in his prime to 123 pounds.
“Are you Slim?” asked one of the two armed officers standing outside his second floor apartment, where Lewis’ full name is printed neatly below the doorbell.
The officer didn’t say which agency he was with, Lewis said, but his uniform said HSI — Homeland Security Investigations. (Security camera footage reviewed by MLK50 and ProPublica showed an officer identifying himself to the landlord as a U.S. marshal.)
“I thought they was ICE,” Lewis said.
One of the officers grabbed his arm, and the other told Lewis to walk down the stairs and sit on the bottom step. A third officer showed Lewis a photograph on his cellphone of a sex offender the officers were looking for. “I said, ‘That ain’t none of me.’”
They then asked Lewis for identification. “How I got ID and I’m in my drawers?” Lewis snapped.
They took him back to his apartment for his wallet, and an officer pulled out Lewis’ state ID. He was not the man they were looking for.
If officers had asked for his ID earlier, Lewis said, they would have recognized their mistake, and he would have been spared the indignity of being questioned by police in his nightclothes in front of his neighbors. MLK50 and ProPublica reviewed Lewis’ notes made after the Oct. 2 incident as well as text exchanges with his sister about the encounter, and interviewed his sister, a neighbor and his landlord.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Homeland Security Investigations, did not respond to questions about Lewis’ experience. Neither did the U.S. Marshals Service.
As the officers left without an apology, one offered a fist bump. But Lewis was angry. “I said, ‘Y’all done pissed me off with all this bull, and y’all don’t even know who you’re looking for!’”