If you trust the Tennessee Conservative website as your primary source of news and information, you probably agree with it that state officials are insufficiently hostile to undocumented immigrants. A bunch of dang RINOs.
As a result, those immigrants flock to Tennessee to flout the laws and generally foment havoc. A bunch of dang criminals.
Easily identifiable by their permanent tans.
Nothing makes the Tennessee Conservative happier than posting mug shots of one or more immigrants – typically described as “illegal aliens” – arrested for something. Doesn’t matter much what.
So I can only imagine the in-house glee that accompanied this headline from Feb. 6: “Illegal Aliens Killed 49 Tennesseans in 2025.” That was amended the very next day to say “41 Killed” – no explanation for the discrepancy – but the outrage remained: “Where Are The Protests?!?!”
I found myself wondering: Where are the facts? More on that in a minute.
The man behind all this is Brandon Lewis, the Tennessee Conservative founder. Lewis, a Chattanooga business owner by trade and right-wing propagandist by inclination, is greatly vexed by the presence of illegal immigrants.
He is not greatly vexed by federal agents killing American citizens. This is his remarkably blasé account of that happening to two people in Minneapolis:
“And we had two incidents, right, the lady trying to run the dude over gets shot; a dude fidgeting with his gun and doing all kinds of stuff with law enforcement around gets shot.”
Empathy is not his strong suit, apparently. Nor, I would suggest, is eloquence.
But are the facts on his side regarding Tennessee deaths? Yes and, maybe, no.
A few years back the legislature mandated that the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference “collect and analyze data from law enforcement agencies on the number of persons not lawfully present in the United States charged or convicted of a criminal offense in this state during the previous year.”
The most recent report, for 2025, found eight arrests for first-degree murder; four for second-degree murder; 10 for vehicular homicide; and 19 for unclassified homicide.
I assume that’s where the Tennessee Conservative got its 41 figure. The 49 is still a mystery. Maybe somebody flunked addition in elementary school.
Here is Problem No. 1 with the claim: These are not all convictions. The Tennessee Conservative may presume the guilt of every person who is arrested, but that isn’t how our legal system works.
Problem No. 2: The report includes no information on the victims, so we don’t know that they were all Tennesseans. Small point, maybe, but I suspect the TC may have no qualms if “illegal aliens” are simply subtracting other “illegal aliens” from our midst.
But neither of those is the biggest problem.
What the Tennessee Conservative does by focusing only on crimes by immigrants encourages the view of immigrants only as criminals or as more criminal – criminaler? – than citizens are.
The General Assembly creates the same impression when it aims its considerable animus toward immigrants. They’re seen not as neighbors, not as the people who build our houses and staff our restaurants and contribute to our melting pot society, but as invaders. Rapists and murderers, as the president has proclaimed, “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Studies don’t confirm such a view. One cited by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute in 2020, using data from 2018 in Texas, found this: “The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45% below that of native-born Americans in Texas.”
In summary: Native-born Americans had the highest criminal conviction rates, followed by illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants had the lowest rates for all of other specific types of crimes.
Based on findings like that, the country would be safer if we deported all native-born Americans rather than the recent arrivals, regardless of their immigration status. So, to quote the great swamp sage, Pogo:
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.