Some Memphis businesses suffer amid federal Task Force presence

Some Memphis businesses report the Memphis Safe Task Force is keeping customers away, including the presence of the Tennessee National Guard. Guard members patrol a relatively emplty Beale Street on Nov. 21, a Friday night (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

MEMPHIS — Saturday lunch is usually peak busy at La Guadalupana restaurant, one of the city’s oldest sit-down Mexican taquerias along a busy commercial strip in the city’s diverse Berclair neighborhood.

But on one recent Saturday, owner Juan Castelan gestured in the direction of mostly empty tables.  

Business is down 30% to 40% since the Memphis Safe Task Force began making thousands of traffic stops and arrests for alleged criminal and immigration law violations in September. 

Castelan has had to cut hours for his full-time kitchen and waitstaff to 25 or 28 per week, from 40.

It is common to hear sirens and witness federal and state officers conducting traffic stops and making arrests multiple times a day through the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling windows, he said.

“The Hispanic community just sees all these police and says, ‘OK, nobody else is going outside’ so they just stay home,” he said. 

Across town on Beale Street, the city’s neon-lit entertainment district, blues bars and Memphis barbecue restaurants sat near empty at 9 p.m. on the Friday night before Thanksgiving. 

“I work on Beale Street and it is dead,” said Joe Calhoun, who operates the Withers Collection Museum, a designated landmark on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.

Calhoun said museum attendance has been down since January due to a perception of crime in Memphis, the impetus cited in a presidential memo establishing the task for to restore “law and order” to the city through “hypervigilant policing” 

But the constant presence of Tennessee National Guard patrolling Beale Street and news coverage of arrests is deterring visitors, he said.

Attendance at the museum has dropped as much as 50% this fall as foot traffic dwindled even further along the three-block entertainment district.

“Everyone, unilaterally, is saying business is flat.” said Calhoun, a member of the Beale Street Merchants Association.

The Task Force is having a similar economic impact on local businesses as the COVID pandemic, said Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who is challenging the constitutionality of the Guard deployment in court.

“Nobody is going downtown right now with all of this going on,” Harris said. “I mean it’s tough for people to justify going to Target, when you’ve got men in military fatigues protecting Target, and I guess I put protection in quotation marks.”

Harris said the chilling effect of the Task Force presence has extended to attendance at many public activities, particularly for Memphis’ Latino community, he said. 

“Everyone is just waiting and hoping that some of this dragnet reduces so they can go out, particularly Latino communities. Latino communities are frozen,” he said. 

“People can’t go to church; people can’t go to the extracurricular activities for their children…People in some cases are afraid to go look for a job because they’re afraid they might get caught up in a dragnet.”

Supporters of the Task Force, including Gov. Bill Lee and Republican lawmakers, have touted its success in taking criminals off the streets.

Data released by the Task Force shows 3500 arrests and over 39,000 traffic stops since it began operations in late September.

“This is how we restore law and order in Memphis,” said Sen. Brent Taylor, a Republican representing parts of Shelby County, said last week, citing a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation report confirming crime in Memphis was at a 25-year low before the Task Force operation began. 

The Task Force presence has stressed small business owners in other ways, said Mauricio Calvo, president and CEO of Latino Memphis. 

Calvo and his colleagues now routinely see Tennessee Highway Patrol cars and dark SUVs driven by federal immigration agents parked outside a popular Mexican restaurant across the street from their office. 

“The first time it happened, it really freaked us out,” said Calvo who, along with a staff immigration attorney, rushed to the restaurant to provide legal aid to restaurant workers. 

It soon became apparent that the law enforcement officials were dining at the restaurant, not making arrests. 

Memphis restaurants have been called out on social media and threatened with boycotts for serving meals to Task Force members, but Calvo said owners he has spoken to feel they have no choice: refusing service could make them a target of the Task Force.

“It is such a humiliating thing,” serving Task Force members, he said. “I mean, I wish they could understand what this means to the workers there, to the people, to us as a community.”

Restaurants, retail, construction and other sectors have also contended with workers unwilling to come to work for fear they could be detained, he said.

“This may sound stereotypical, but Latinos are an important part of the essential workers, construction workers, landscaping, hospitality, where people are not showing up to work right now,” he said.

Calhoun, the Beale Street museum operator, said he has had to accommodate the heightened concern of his own staff.

“My maintenance people and my housekeepers are Hispanic. They’re afraid to come to work. They will only come to work in the middle of the day because they’re afraid to come at night.”