Nine months after President Donald Trump ordered an anti-crime taskforce onto the streets of Memphis, a small band of dedicated observers is attempting to monitor its actions, alleging widespread intimidation by agents who they say have tailed cars, surveilled homes, and falsely arrested one community observer.
The allegations are detailed in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee. A taskforce spokesman declined to comment.
Thousands of federal and state law enforcement officers flooded Memphis in a surge that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has said will last “for ever” to drive down crime. Activists trying to track the taskforce claim it is responsible for rampant violations of the First Amendment in the name of public safety, wreaking havoc on their streets and targeting members of the community who have done nothing wrong.
“I just have no clue where they’re getting their intel from, but they tend to show up at the wrong house regularly,” said Hunter Demster, lead plaintiff in the lawsuit and food justice director at First Congo, a progressive church in Memphis. “Out of the dozens and dozens and dozens [of operations] that I have witnessed, I’d say 90% of them were at the wrong house.”
Demster described scenes of 30 to 50 federal agents in paramilitary body armor with assault rifles, helmets, and battering rams showing up at a house, traumatizing an innocent family, pointing weapons at children, and dragging people out in their underwear looking for someone who “in a lot of cases has never lived in that house.”
“You know, I personally feel called to do this work, but I don’t want to give the wrong impression; I’m terrified,” Demster said. “I’m terrified when I go out in a lot of cases.”
Demster, a longtime activist who took part in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015 and helped found Decarcerate Memphis in 2020, said the personal harassment has taken its toll. “When I’m sitting in my house these days and I hear something abnormal, I’m jumping up and peeking through the windows,” he said. “The heightened state that I feel I have to maintain to watch my back has impacted my life.”
Dave Mason, a 56-year-old theater professor at Rhodes College and father of two, said he rolls up to taskforce scenes on a Vespa scooter with two cameras and starts taking pictures. Police regularly invoke the 25-foot rule — intentionally approaching a police officer within 25 feet is an arrestable offense, a class B misdemeanor, in Tennessee — when they see him, he said, calling him by name in ways he finds mildly intimidating.
“I am autistic, and my autism impacts how close I generally get to taskforce activity,” Mason noted in a statement accompanying the ACLU lawsuit. “I approach to the limit of my autistic comfort, which always involves some distance.”
Mason said he feels a moral responsibility “to try to mitigate that harm and that suffering to whatever extent I can.” He added: “I hope that I’m doing something important.”
James West, a retired anesthesiologist who served as director of liver transplant anesthesiology at the Methodist Transplant Institute in Memphis, said he began filming law enforcement officers’ actions in Memphis out of the conviction that doing so could bring attention to potential abuses of power. West said U.S. Customs and Border Protection revoked his global entry status, citing that he may be “subject to a law enforcement investigation” or was suspected of “conduct related to terrorism.”
Jordyn Gualdani, a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist who uses a wheelchair due to a genetic condition similar to multiple sclerosis, said police in Memphis have repeatedly pushed him back beyond the 25-foot buffer zone, describing it as a moving target. “Agents will keep citing the Halo Law as they keep advancing toward me, effectively pushing me further and further back from the scene,” he said in his declaration. Gualdani also alleged that vehicles driven by taskforce agents “bumper rushed” his car several times.
Jessica Chodor, a project and data manager for a nonprofit providing postpartum support, said she started volunteering as a legal observer in June 2025 after hearing about an incident in which agents were said to have broken into someone’s home without a warrant and assaulted a witness. On Oct. 28, 2025, a state trooper tackled her to the ground and arrested her while she stood across the street from an enforcement operation. Police dropped the charge of “resisting official detention” in December.
“After the charge against me was dismissed, I resumed but have reduced my observing to two hours per month because of the impact that incident has had on my family and my sense of safety,” Chodor said.
Christopher Kersey, 31, a community college student at Southwest Community College who works in a grocery store, said he started recording the taskforce in October 2025 after witnessing a terrified woman and her young son being pulled over by a state trooper, with six unmarked cars following. Kersey said he has been followed by taskforce agents, questioned, and threatened with jail. “Keep talking and you’re going to end up in jail,” he recalled a Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper telling him.
MSI previously reported that four Memphis residents sued the Memphis Safe Task Force in May, alleging First Amendment violations. That lawsuit is ongoing.