Tennessee’s Checkpoint State

Eight bills. One project. A government that starts treating ordinary life like a border crossing.

So… this one is bleak.

I just spent a week in Hawaiʻi for a wedding… sunsets that looked fake, water so clear it made you feel honest. I also promised my girlfriend some “no notification time.” I mostly kept it. Mostly.

But every time I cracked my phone, Tennessee’s Republican supermajority was right there… rolling out a coordinated package of immigration bills they developed with White House input.

So I’m going to break this piece up with a few photos from that trip. Because one of the only ways I get through the sh*tstorm is holding onto something I still, maybe naively, believe: this place we live in has enormous potential, and a lot of it is worth protecting.

These bills build a checkpoint state. Not at the border. But in your county clerk’s office. At the licensing counter. In the payroll system. In the courthouse. In the monthly reports your local staff now has to file… or risk a criminal charge.

The package works the same way authoritarian policy always works, it turns daily life into a documentation test, turn government workers into enforcers, punish any local community that refuses to play along.

Can we state the obvious? Tennessee doesn’t share a border with Mexico. That’s the whole tell. The goal here isn’t “border security.” The goal is power. Power distributed across thousands of small interactions where people can be delayed, denied, flagged, referred, and disciplined.

Let’s walk through the architecture.

Coerce local government, and call it “local control”

Two bills make the threat explicit: comply, or the state starts taking your money.

HB1705. E-Verify for every state & local government hire

This forces state and local government employers (including counties, municipalities, and local education agencies) to run new hires through E-Verify. It also bans local policies “contrary” to the law.

And the hammer… if the Attorney General finds a local government out of compliance, the state can withhold “all funds”… including state-shared taxes.

HB1710. Verify immigration status for public benefits + monthly reporting

HB1710 expands Tennessee’s “Eligibility Verification for Entitlements Act” reach and then weaponizes enforcement the same way. Meaning the Attorney General can withhold all state funds allocated to a local entity, including state-shared taxes.

Then it mandates monthly reports to the General Assembly, Finance & Administration, and the state’s centralized immigration enforcement division.

And it puts a felony-adjacent edge on the whole thing. Failure to file the required report is a Class A misdemeanor.

There’s your pattern. Financial blackmail for institutions, criminal exposure for individuals.

Republicans love to preach small government and local control. This package does the opposite. It centralizes power in Nashville, then makes every city and county carry the enforcement burden.

Tennessee has 95 counties. It also has 345 cities and towns.

That’s hundreds of separate systems (HR departments, clerks, benefits offices) now shoved into a single compliance pipeline backed by the state’s threat to cut off revenue.

Paid subscribers get the full deep dive tonight.
The free version goes out tomorrow morning.

Below: the rest of the bill-by-bill breakdown, the enforcement pipeline, the funding threats, and the cost math… using Tennessee’s own fiscal assumptions.

If you want it first (and you want more reporting like this all session), subscribe.

Build the propaganda engine that “justifies” the next crackdown

HB1711. Quarterly surveillance reports + an annual “cost of illegal immigration” report

HB1711 requires every state agency to file quarterly reports on encounters where lawful presence can’t be verified, routed through the centralized immigration enforcement division and shared with a federal immigration official.

Then it mandates an annual report claiming to calculate “the total cost of illegal immigration to taxpayers,” including education, healthcare, prisons, and social services.

And again… the bill makes a reporting failure a Class A misdemeanor.

That annual report requirement matters more than most people will realize on first read. It’s a built-in narrative generator. A state-produced document designed to be cited in press conferences, campaign mailers, and the next round of “emergency” bills. Once the state institutionalizes a single, politicized “cost” storyline, it becomes the fuel source for escalation.

Turn everyday life into “papers, please”

This is where the checkpoint state becomes physical.

HB1708. Driver’s licenses and vehicle registration as a status test

HB1708 does two things that should set off alarms.

First: it creates a one-time language exception for the written exam, and then turns it into a trap. If someone tests in a language other than English, the state can issue only a restricted, non-renewable, one-year license limited to school, work, and medical appointments. Then, to keep driving, the applicant must retake the written exam in English only, with no interpreter or translation tools.

Second: it ties vehicle registration and renewals to proof that the applicant is a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident, or otherwise authorized to be in the U.S.
It even mandates a notice with every registration/renewal declaring the owner/operator must fall into those categories.

Now zoom out for a secon… Tennessee has 6,950,844 registered vehicles (FHWA Highway Statistics 2023).

That’s millions of transactions and renewals and clerk-counter interactions. When you design a system like this, you aren’t just targeting a group—you’re turning routine life into a verification chokepoint, and you’re doing it inside the infrastructure that touches almost everyone.

HB1709. Professional licensing as a sorting machine

HB1709 rewrites licensing requirements across a wide swath of professions, repeatedly requiring proof the applicant is a U.S. citizen or “qualified alien.” It even “encourages” the state Supreme Court to limit eligibility for a law license the same way.

This is how you quietly build a two-tier society. Dozens of small gates where people can be disqualified from stable work and professional life.

Create new state crimes, and include a “switch” for when federal law changes

HB1704. New state crimes tied to removal orders, plus a preemption trigger

HB1704 creates a Class A misdemeanor for someone under a final order of removal who “fails or refuses to depart” from Tennessee within 90 days. It also creates a Class A misdemeanor for someone previously removed/deported who then enters or attempts to enter Tennessee (with narrow federal-consent exceptions).

And then the bill shows its hand. Part of it is written to take effect only after a trigger—either the U.S. Supreme Court overrules Arizona v. United States (2012) in a way that authorizes states to determine unlawful presence, or Congress changes federal law to remove preemption.

They are building laws they know run into federal limits today, and wiring in a future activation switch for a more extreme tomorrow.

The lawsuit cannon: privatize enforcement, add million-dollar penalties, remove safeguards

HB1706. Commercial driving + 287(g) notification + $1,000,000 minimums + qui tam bounties

HB1706 makes it a Class A misdemeanor for someone “unlawfully present” to operate a commercial motor vehicle in Tennessee, and for anyone to knowingly allow it.
It mandates that arresting agencies ensure federal immigration authorities are notified—either through 287(g) or through Tennessee’s centralized immigration enforcement division.

Then it escalates.

It creates strict, joint liability and guarantees punitive damages of not less than $1,000,000 (explicitly “notwithstanding” Tennessee’s punitive damages statute).
It authorizes the Attorney General to seek civil penalties of not less than $1,000,000 per violating employer. And it creates a qui tam private enforcement mechanism—allowing private plaintiffs to sue “on behalf of the state,” with guaranteed percentages of the proceeds.

Finally, it strips a key protection:. The bill says these civil actions are not subject to the Tennessee Public Participation Act (an anti-SLAPP safeguard).

It invites profit-driven enforcement and piles existential risk onto employers, agencies, and communities… while carving out protections that normally deter harassment litigation.

The “small” bill that reveals their posture

HB1707. Tighten the screws

HB1707 is short, and that’s the point. It deletes the phrase “less than ninety (90) days nor” from an existing statute.

Packages like this always include a few “minor” edits that look boring in isolation. Together, they show posture: shorten windows, remove buffers, tighten timelines, increase exposure. Bureaucracy becomes the punishment.

“Run the numbers”: the taxpayer argument collapses on contact with reality

Republicans will sell this package as fiscal responsibility. Fine. Let’s talk like they do.

These bills create new crimes, new enforcement obligations, and new reporting mandates across hundreds of agencies and local governments. That costs money, and it lands on taxpayers.

Tennessee fiscal notes often model local incarceration impacts using a daily jail cost and an assumed length of stay for a Class A misdemeanor. One recent fiscal note uses $67 per inmate per day and a 15-day local incarceration assumption.

That’s $1,005 per case just for local jail operating cost:

• 1,000 cases → $1,005,000

• 5,000 cases → $5,025,000

• 10,000 cases → $10,050,000

And that’s only the daily jail cost.. before you count arrest time, transport, overtime, prosecutors, public defenders, court calendars, detention holds, medical costs, and the administrative buildout for monthly/quarterly reporting.

Tennessee’s own fiscal note framework also flags the state constitution’s mandate-funding requirement (Article II, Section 24.) That’s the very thing Republicans love to forget when they dump new obligations on local governments.

Then add HB1706’s architecture: million-dollar punitive damages minimums, million-dollar civil penalties, bounty-style lawsuits. None of this is “saving taxpayer money.” It’s building an expensive machine and daring everyone to touch it.

The education front: they keep coming for kids, because they want a court fight

Tennessee Republicans have already pushed legislation aimed at letting public schools deny admission or charge tuition to undocumented students… an effort widely understood as a direct challenge to Plyler v. Doe (1982), where the Supreme Court held states can’t deny free public K-12 education based on immigration status absent a substantial state interest.

That matters here because it shows the through-line. Once the checkpoint state exists, it doesn’t stop at the DMV or the licensing board. It moves toward schools. Hospitals. Housing. The ordinary places where people try to live.

So Chase, what this package does, in plain English?

Tennessee Republicans are building a system where…

• Local governments get forced into immigration enforcement, with state-shared revenue used as a compliance whip.

• Public employees and agencies get placed under criminal pressure for reporting failures.

• Driving and registering a car turns into a status checkpoint for millions of transactions.

• Work and licensing get narrowed into a legal status filter.

• New state crimes get created—and future-proofed for a world where the Supreme Court or Congress gives states more room to police immigration.

• Private enforcement gets incentivized with bounty-style suits and million-dollar minimums, while key legal protections get carved out.

That’s a checkpoint state. Tennessee Republicans are building conveyor belt from normal life into surveillance, referrals, detention risk, and legal exposure… built one counter, one form, one “verification” step at a time.

And here’s the thing people need to understand before they scroll past all of this.

A machine like this never stays pointed at the group they told you to fear.
Once government learns it can condition daily life on documentation and complianc. Once it learns it can force cities and counties into line by taking their money… it doesn’t unlearn that trick.