by Sarah Grace Taylor, Nashville Banner
January 15, 2026
As other states like Minnesota push back on disruptive, sometimes violent raids from federal immigration enforcement agencies like ICE, Tennessee leaders are doubling down on their commitment to help the federal government target immigrants.
Tennessee’s Republican leadership introduced a White House-driven suite of immigration enforcement bills aimed at depriving residents without citizenship of access to public services, funnelling those without documentation into the criminal court system and imposing fiscal and criminal penalties on local officials who don’t comply.
“We’re going to do what we can to make sure that if you’re here illegally, we will have the data, we will have the transparency, and we’re not spending taxpayer dollars on you unless you’re in jail,” House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) told reporters Thursday morning, before the bills were filed.
Sexton and his peers from both the state House and Senate were still filing bills at the end of the day Thursday that will comprise a broad and punitive series of state laws co-authored by and designed to aid the Trump Administration in rounding up those without citizenship and forcibly removing them from the country.
The eight-bill package, which was described by Sexton and others in a joint news conference but is still being fleshed out, will build off of previous legislative efforts, using road laws, employment verification and withholding public resources to smoke out those unlawfully present in Tennessee, even if it challenges local authority, federal court precedent and the discretion of local law enforcement agencies.
The bills are the result of months-long coordination with the Trump Administration, namely Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller.
During the news conference, Sexton declined to share details of the collaboration with Miller, but
Senate Republican Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) said that the package was intended to back the White House’s agenda as other states push back against ICE raids in their communities.
“We’re sending a very strong message today with this legislative package that in Tennessee, we want to be the model for the nation,” Johnson said. “We’re not only going to cooperate with the White House and our federal immigration enforcement officials, but we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they are successful.”
Advocates from the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition responded to the announcement Thursday, criticizing Republicans for focusing on penalizing immigrants during the first week of this year’s legislative calendar rather than prioritizing the needs of Tennesseans more broadly.
“An anti-immigrant agenda ends up harming all of us, all Tennesseans because it weakens our communities, our economy and our public trust,” TIRRC Votes Executive Director Lisa Sherman Luna said Thursday.
Sponsors of the legislation argued that the bills do, in fact, benefit Tennesseans by removing “dangerous illegals” and preventing undocumented people from accessing public resources.
“We want to make sure, whatever we do, we’re protecting Tennesseans, Tennessee families, tax dollars, preserving the legal immigration way into our state, and making sure that if you need benefits, and you need resources, that Tennesseans have access to it, and not someone here illegally,” Sexton said.
Sexton insisted that the suite of legislation would cost less than the savings the state would realize by disallowing undocumented immigrants from accessing public resources, though he could not provide figures for either. Notably, tax experts believe that immigrants, regardless of status, tend to overpay through sales and other tax, while underutilizing resources, especially in a state without an income tax, like Tennessee.
Sherman Luna promised community action in response to the bills and noted that some can likely be challenged in court since immigration typically falls within federal jurisdiction, and others, like one that requires people to take the driver’s license test in English, seem to not be about immigration at all.
“It makes all of us more safe when people can have a driver’s license, pass the driver’s license exam, and have insurance,” Sherman Luna said.
“It’s about discrimination and making it harder for people who don’t speak the same language or don’t look like you to be able to access our roads,” she added.
Inside the bills
Forced compliance: This package of bills continues Tennessee lawmakers’ recent efforts to force local governments and law enforcement into compliance with anti-immigrant policies, adding a litany of reporting requirements and threatening to penalize judges and withhold tax revenue for noncompliance or even jail government employees.
One such bill filed Thursday requires all state and local governments to use the federal “E-Verify” system to confirm every new hire’s immigration status and authorizes the state to withhold “all funds of this state allocated to the local government via grant, contract, or statute, including, but not limited to, state-shared taxes,” if a local government fails to comply.
Local governments must also verify someone’s status before allowing them to access any state, local or federal “public benefit,” according to a new bill. This bill would also charge government employees who fail to report noncompliance with a Class A misdemeanor charge, marking the third time since January 2025 that state lawmakers have considered a bill to criminally charge other government officials for their noncompliance with immigration-related policy. When a bill threatening to jail local elected officials who support so-called sanctuary cities was passed in last year’s special session, it prompted a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality and outlining broad concern about governmental overreach.
When speaking to the bill, lawmakers used public housing as an example of public resources that would be withheld, but did not provide information when asked how the bill would impact undocumented people’s access to emergency services or resources from the Department of Children Services.
Courts and law enforcement will also be required to comply with state immigration policies, though the details of those efforts were not confirmed on Thursday. While the release from Republican leaders says the package will require “courts and local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE and enhance 287(g) agreements,” Sexton said the language was still up in the air.
“We’re still working with different entities on how best to have more utilization of the 287(g) process,” Sexton said, noting that around 50 law enforcement agencies statewide have joined agreements to help federal immigration enforcement since the state began incentivising participation in the controversial program last year. It’s unclear if the state will mandate participation in the program to target cities like Nashville, which have generally not volunteered to help with immigration enforcement.
While courts are not currently required to participate with ICE, Sexton said the package will seek to require participation, and will send officers of the court to the Board of Judicial Conduct.
Schools bill: Another bill not yet resolved would require verification of the status of K-12 students, but has few available details.
The new bill seems to be an intermediary step toward efforts from last year to allow local school boards to charge tuition to or bar children without legal citizenship from enrollment, while also requiring some reporting from schools on the number of undocumented students present. While that bill by House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) and Sen. Bo Watson (R-Chattanooga) passed the Senate, it has stalled given the risk it poses to $1.1 billion in federal education funding.
As of Thursday, sponsors were still waiting to hear from the White House before moving forward with either version of the bill.
“As far as collecting the data and that sort of stuff, we will send it to the Department of Education or somewhere,” Sexton said when asked who would have access to the status of students. “We will work out that detail as well, but we’re close to, I think, having a better understanding of what the federal government will or will not do on that piece of legislation.”
Criminalizing illegal immigration: While immigration has always been a civil issue in the U.S. — meaning it is not a crime, but can still be litigated in court — a new bill by Lamberth criminalizes the act of being in Tennessee illegally, establishing a Class A misdemeanor for knowingly, intentionally being in Tennessee after receiving a final deportation order.
“That is a clear and concise order to an individual that they’ve exhausted all parts of the judicial system at the federal level, and the federal government has ordered that they leave this country. They are no longer here legally,” Lamberth said of deportation orders.
“If that person, anyone that has a final deportation order, is caught by law enforcement right here, they’ll go to jail,” he added.
In Tennessee, a Class A misdemeanor is punishable by up to 11 months and 29 days in jail and a fine of $2,500. More realistically, because of the state’s increased cooperation with ICE and other federal agencies, people arrested on this charge would be handed to the feds and removed from the country.
The bill, as written, would not apply to anyone still in the immigration court process who has not received a final order.
Driving: While sponsors claim that a series of traffic laws proposed in the package are intended to improve road safety, the bills seem designed to catch more undocumented drivers on nonmoving violations and funnel them into jail or other interactions with local law enforcement, who may also be required to turn the drivers over to ICE.
One bill filed by Johnson and Rep. Jason Zachary (R-Knoxville) creates a Class A misdemeanor charge for operating a motor vehicle in Tennessee as an unlawful resident and requires law enforcement to notify federal agents of the violation. Other bills mentioned in the package will prohibit those without citizenship or lawful residence from getting vehicle registration, and make law enforcement contact ICE if they encounter someone who is undocumented driving on a commercial driver’s license issued by another state. Like Lamberth’s criminalization bill, the Class A misdemeanor could result in jail time and a fine, but would more likely lead to deportation. Similarly, the registration bill could set undocumented drivers up for quicker deportation by giving law enforcement, who are forced to comply with ICE, a reason to stop drivers whose tags have expired but cannot be renewed.
Finally, the bill referenced by Sherman Luna will force people to take the driver’s test in English, except for a one time per individual option to take it in another language, designed to protect those here on work visas. Those who take a foreign language driver’s test would be required to pass the test in English one year later to maintain their license.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
