Three People from Nashville Were on the Plane to El Salvador’s CECOT, Did Metro Nashville Help?

Something here doesn’t pass the sniff test.

The list of individuals on the planes to CECOT was leaked last month to major news agencies. Some industrious advocate put together a list to track where individuals were disappeared from and what cases were associated with them. Not every name has been tracked, but one identified led me to a case that, while dismissed by Metro, got three Venezuelan men disappeared to El Salvador. And in a manner that really makes me question how MNPD, the DA, and Metro Nashville generally have been working with state and federal actors in cases dealing with undocumented immigrants.

On January 8^th, five men, three of which are the Venezuelans mentioned above, were arrested for allegedly running a brothel in Antioch per a statement put out by Metro. The arrests were a product of cooperation between MNPD, Homeland Security, TBI, and FBI.

There was a plethora of local reporting of this raid at the time.  

Neither the Metro statement nor the reporting by local news outlets at the time link the alleged perpetrators to any gang, but eventually it arose. At first it was slowly within local conservative media outlets but then it took up steam.

The problem however, is that the county clerk has a record that all charges have been dismissed and the cases closed as of January 22^nd. However, that didn’t stop ICE and DHS to put three of these individuals on a plane to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador on March 22^nd after the Executive Order on March 15^th that labelled Tren Da Aragua an enemy of the state.

Wildredo Mata Fornerino, all charges dismissed.

Idenis Sanchez-Parades, all charges dismissed.

Elmer Aparicio Castillo, all charges dismissed.

Sex trafficking is a serious matter. A coordinated crime ring run by gangs is exceptionally serious. One would hope raids trying to end such a practice would be on point. Yet, it seems after being labelled as members of a gang running a sex trafficking ring, all charges by MNPD were dropped with no follow up coverage.

I do not know why these charges were dismissed, that’s for an industrious journalist to dig into, but what I do understand, and after talking to several litigators, is that a dismissal for a case after an abundance of media coverage is kind of a big deal.

It appears to be is that MNPD, wittingly or unwittingly, is already working with immigration law enforcement to arrest immigrants. The helped conduct a raid and charged them with serious crimes with allusions to if not direct allegations of gang membership, Those charges did not hold up in court but the damage was already done and at least three people from Nashville are in a notorious prison labor camp as a result.

Here is the big hairy question: Is MNPD, intentionally or unintentionally, providing cover for immigration law enforcement to bypass due process?

And here are some specific questions to lead to the hairy one:

In detail, why were these cases dismissed?

What occurred during the raid? What was found and entered into the record?

What is MNPD/ Sheriff’s office/ DA’s timeline from the point of planning the raid to the time they handed custody to ICE?

What other cases have MNPD, TBI, ICE and other federal agencies collaborated on?

On the last question, it appears that this is not an isolated case. The names mentioned in a later ICE press release on Nashville do not match the list of those shipped on the plane to CECOT. Furthermore, cross referencing the names in the ICE press release to local court records illustrate  at least some of these cases remain open. What is the state of these local cases? Do they also seem prime for dismissal? Are they slated for similar treatment when detained by ICE?

Because what it looks like is that, at best, MNPD, and the district attorney for that matter, is being used as cover to build a flimsy yet publicly damning pretense to initially incarcerate and eventually traffick immigrants to El Salvador. At worst, it may be aiding and abetting human trafficking by the federal government of innocent immigrants to a brutal work camp and using human trafficking itself as a cynical cover.

Now, I am not a lawyer. There could be a very reasonable explanation to why a high profile case is dismissed. However, I did speak to several seasoned litigators and none of them could give me one.

It just doesn’t pass the sniff test. I don’t see it any other way than incompetence or malice, and neither should be tolerated.

The media should not be off the hook for this either. Almost all the local news outlets covered this story on January 8^th initially. They carried ICE water. But when charges were dismissed just two weeks later, there was zero coverage. Zero follow through.

We could wax economic or political about the collapse of local news outlets or the evergreen mantra of “if it leads, it bleeds” metric-based coverage, but a little bit of follow up should be the bare minimum. Local news covered the initial sting operation, but not if the charges stung.

It shouldn’t take a rando who thinks “hey, this list of people trafficked to an offshore gulag might have some people from Nashville on it, let’s ctrl+f this thing and see where it leads” to find it.

Certainly not three months after the fact.