Tennessee bills on immigration status face backlash - Nashville Banner

Before a meeting of the House Finance, Ways and Means Subcommittee started Wednesday morning, hundreds of people flooded the hallway of the Cordell Hull legislative office building to oppose a pair of bills that would require schools and other public entities to track and report immigration status.

The protesters, including a large number of public school students, filled every seat in the committee room and crowded the hallways outside as a familiar bill, House Bill 793, returned to the legislature after a nearly year-long hiatus.

Sponsored by House Majority Leader Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland), HB793 was originally written to allow school boards to charge tuition or deny enrollment to students who were not legally present in the U.S., directly challenging a landmark Supreme Court decision, *Plyler v. Doe, *which has, for decades, defended students’ rights to attend public school regardless of immigration status.

But Lamberth halted his own bill last April, even after it squeaked through a final Senate vote, as questions mounted over whether the bill would jeopardize $1 billion in federal education funding that the state receives each year.

“There’s no way that I want to bring a bill forward that would endanger $1.1 Billion while we’re trying to add additional funds in [the budget] for K-12 public education,” Lamberth said.

The amended version of the bill abandons any denial or tuition charge, but requires schools to verify each individual student’s immigration status at the time of enrollment and report the aggregate number of students with each status to the state. Immigration advocates and educators say the bill could still help law enforcement target specific schools or districts for immigration enforcement, may dissuade students from attending school and would require additional staff and training to analyze often-complicated immigration records.

Those opponents sang protest songs in the hallway and in the hearing room before Lamberth was up, and the meeting began 10 minutes late with a stern warning from the chair, Rep. Ryan Williams (R-Cookeville), who told protesters he would recess the meeting and clear the room if they broke decorum.

Students pressed their cheeks against the windows of the doors to the committee room to hear the discussion.

Lamberth walked through the hall of people shouting “shame” at him and returned to the room, grinning, before presenting his bill and amendment. During his presentation, Lamberth explained that he has spent the nearly one-year hiatus on this measure seeking assurance from the federal government that the state would not lose funding if it passed.

Ultimately, he couldn’t get the greenlight.

Rep. Jason Zachary (R-Knoxville) argued that the bill was necessary for the state to make funding decisions.

“As legislators, we cannot make informed decisions without data, and right now we simply do not know what the attendance is in our school systems across the state, regarding children who are here illegally,” Zachary said, claiming that the state spends $571 million annually to educate those children. “But that is just a guess.”

Zachary’s comments echoed the original rationale for the bill, which Lamberth and Senate sponsor Bo Watson (R-Hixson) said was necessary because of the cost of educating undocumented students, which they claim is an “undue” burden on the state Research suggests, however, that immigrants overpay in taxes compared to the public resources they access, particularly in states like Tennessee with no income tax.

A Nashville immigration attorney, a Knox County school board member and a Robertson County Republican were among those who testified against the bill, calling it unnecessarily punitive to children, cost-prohibitive for schools and antithetical to the state’s responsibility to educate children.

“What you’re doing goes against what the ideal of the Republican party has stood for and it goes against the state constitution. Punishing children and not educating them does not make Tennessee safer,” Johanna Keohane said. “Being Conservative does not mean not spending money; it means spending it wisely, and education is a wise use of money.”

“As a tax-paying Tennessean, I want my money to go to educating children, no matter who they are,” Keohane continued. “You don’t involve children and target children because of the actions of adults.”

At the end of Keohane’s testimony, another activist named Joelly, who did not want to share her last name, stood up to speak but was not allowed to. After the meeting, she told the Banner she had tried to register online to testify three times but was not allowed.

After a brief exchange between Joely and the chair, she left the meeting and protest rumbles intensified as the subcommittee took a speedy vote, recommending the passage of the bill.

Again, the crowd erupted into singing and protest, prompting a recessed meeting and the room being cleared. Outside, Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Nashville) encouraged activists, saying their previous protests had helped dilute the bill.

A second tracking bill — one of a suite of legislation fed to state Republicans by the Trump Administration and Stephen Miller — that more broadly requires public entities including schools, hospitals, local governments, colleges and universities to report on all users’ immigration status was set to be heard at a later committee meeting Wednesday, but was deferred by a week, as hundreds of protesters continued to fill the legislative building in anticipation of that vote.

The second bill — HB1711 by Rep. Elaine Davis (R-Knoxville) and Sen. Dawn White (R-Murfreesboro) — is more aggressive, requiring more types of reportingand also requires local law enforcement to “report individuals who are not United States citizens or qualified aliens who are charged or convicted of criminal offenses to the centralized immigration enforcement division,” rather than just requiring an aggregate number.

Moreover, the bill would establish a Class A Misdemeanor charge for those who do not comply with the bill, the third effort by state Republicans to impose criminal penalties on locals who run afoul of state immigration policies during this session.

At a press conference organized by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), educators from Knoxville, Chattanooga and Memphis spoke against the bills, arguing that they would not only cost an estimated $55 million to implement, which the state is not funding, but would also deter students from attending school and negatively impact those who do.

Noah Nordstrom, a high school teacher in Memphis, said that he has students who have already been adversely impacted by an increased presence of immigration enforcement, noting one student who is now the primary driver responsible for taking his siblings to school and is often late to class. Nordstram said another student’sfather was detained and taken away from their family’s home while mowing the lawn.

“It’s created this kind of climate of fear, which is really unproductive emotionally,” Nordstrom said.

Students flanked the educators, holding signs opposing the tracking bills and became emotional as teachers described needing to protect students and their families and expressed concerns that the tracking would conflict with federal FERPA protections.

One student began to cry and was embraced and comforted by a Hamilton County teacher, who also cried.

Nordstrom said he and other educators would prioritize their students’ well-being even if the bills passed.

“I think it’s really important, now more than ever, for teachers to speak up and say that we will not be shaken, we will not be moved, and we will not comply,” Nordstrom said, later confirming that he will not comply with the reporting requirements, even with the criminal penalty written into the bill, and saying many teachers may try to “secretly do the right thing.”