U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche joined federal and state leaders in Tennessee on Friday to tout the record of the Memphis Safe Task Force a little more than one year after President Donald Trump first established the multi-agency crime-fighting force.
Overall crime in Memphis is now at a 25-year low, Blanche said, giving the task force credit for the reduction in violent crimes, robberies and vehicle thefts. Crime, local officials have noted, began trending downward in the city in the year before the task force was convened.
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Blanche gave no timetable for a potential end to the enhanced law enforcement presence, saying the task force will remain in the city “as long as it takes.”
“We haven’t won yet. It’s not over,” he said. Blanche did not define terms for a successful completion of the task force’s mission in Memphis.
He also reiterated the Trump administration’s goal to replicate the model across the country, singling out Chicago as a goal. Like Memphis, the city is minority white, and majority Democrat.
“If you think about a place like Chicago, if Chicago called me and said, ‘we want to replicate Memphis in Chicago,’ we could transform an entire city, one of the most pivotal cities in this country, in the same way that we’ve transformed Memphis,” he said
Since September 2025, the task force has brought hundreds of federal law enforcement officers to the city and surrounding Shelby County to serve warrants, make arrests, detain immigrants, conduct traffic stops and recover missing children, often working in tandem with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and other state and local law enforcement officers. Gov. Bill Lee deployed hundreds of soldiers with the Tennessee National Guard to support the effort.
The task force has been welcomed by Republican leaders, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee for governor, who praised the task force at Friday’s roundtable discussion in a Memphis warehouse alongside state Sen. Brent Taylor and Memphis Police Chief CJ Davis.
But it has faced pushback by many in the Democratic-leaning city as a form of over-policing of predominantly Black and brown communities — pushback that grew earlier this year after the fatal shootings of four Black men by task force members in four separate encounters earlier this year.
Critics and community groups have also highlighted dangerous high speed chases and the heightened presence of officers conducting immigration enforcement in areas of Memphis with large immigrant populations.
Several lawsuits filed by journalists, local leaders and community groups have alleged intimidation against bystanders attempting to monitor enforcement activity and the refusal by state agencies participating in the task force to provide public records.
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