The Shelby County Sheriff's Office has quietly stopped obeying federal requests to hold suspected unauthorized immigrants in jail past their scheduled release dates.
The reason for the policy change: the Shelby County attorney's office ruled in April that the sheriff's office doesn't have to obey the federal requests to hold these immigrants — and that the county government might be violating the U.S. Constitution if it did hold them.
But the jail still cooperates with federal immigration authorities in other ways, including telling agents when suspects will be released and letting agents make arrests at the jail, the sheriff's office said.
The legal opinion is dated April 9, just days after the high-profile arrest of Spanish-language reporter Manuel Duran. And the legal opinion raises questions about what will happen once a new Tennessee law requiring cooperation with federal immigration authorities goes into effect in January.
