Knox County Sheriff's Office defied judge's order in public records case, new legal filing says

The Knox County Sheriff's Office defied a judge's order by sitting on documents it was ordered to make public, according to a new filing in the case by a professor who won a significant open records case related to the agency's participation in a controversial immigration enforcement program.

University of Tennessee at Knoxville professor Meghan Conley first sued for the records four years ago while researching the federal 287(g) immigration enforcement program. She discovered the unreleased documents when she recently received a tranche of papers she had requested from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“They didn’t provide documents, neither when I asked for the information or through the lawsuit,” Conley told Knox News. “And here it is, as plain as you can see. They have records I could’ve used to better understand how this program works."

She filed a new motion Oct. 18 asking the judge to revisit a decision about how much the sheriff's office should have to pay to cover Conley's legal fees.

Knox County joined the 287(g) program in 2017. It deputizes local officers to act on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented residents in return for training and funding. Only 62 local law enforcement agencies nationwide participate at the highest level of the program, essentially taking on federal powers to hold and interrogate people suspected of a crime about their immigration status.

Numerous legal experts say the program encourages racial profiling, encourages local police agencies to detain people accused of minor crimes that don't endanger public safety, and is employed as a political tool by elected sheriffs who want to appear tough on immigration even though immigration policing is the authority of the federal government.

The Oct. 18 filing says Conley received 728 pages of documents from a Freedom of Information Act request made to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Within them she has discovered records that were not disclosed by the sheriff's office even though it was ordered to do so. Conley said she has not finished going through the federal documents and is not ready to say how many there are until she's able to complete her review.

“How are we supposed to understand how our government functions if the people who are responsible for being responsive to public requests are not willing to turn over those documents?" Conley said.

Knox County Law Director David Buuck, whose office helped represent the sheriff’s office in the lawsuit, declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office declined to comment.

Records were ordered to be made public

In 2017, Conley began making public records requests for hundreds of pages of 287(g)-related documents, and was told by Knox County officials under oath in open court the records did not exist.

But many do.

One of the documents was communication sent by federal immigration authorities on the same date Conley requested correspondence between the agency and former Sheriff Jimmy “J.J.” Jones. Separately, other correspondence was sent days after Conley’s original request and “yet were not included in KCSO’s 189-page disclosure of records for that time period.”

Sheriff’s Office Chief Counsel Mike Ruble repeatedly testified in court that he searched Jones’ emails and found only one document related to Conley’s request because Jones “rarely used email. … I never got any from him that I recall,” the lawsuit states, quoting from the court transcript.

The court previously ruled Conley was eligible only for attorney’s fees she paid to get the records that were “willfully denied,” or two of the 12 she sought. The county appealed and a state appellate court passed the case back to Chancellor John Weaver. The case is set to be back in Weaver's court Oct. 26.

The Oct. 18 filing, made by attorney Andrew Fels, asks Weaver to revisit that decision with the new information.

“This court originally rested its partial fee award on the fact that the ‘record does not sustain that the KCSO failed to produce any public record.’ … In reaching this conclusion, the Court relied on assurances from the sheriff’s witness and the Knox County Law Director’s Office that KCSO had already provided Professor Conley with all responsive records to key requests.

“It is unknown how many other responsive records are in the 728-page disclosure or will be revealed by the FOIA case,” Fels wrote.

Sheriff's office willfully withheld public records

Weaver found that the department active evaded sharing public records for months by creating arbitrary delays, exorbitant fees and simply stonewalling Conley’s requests, all while telling her no records could be found.

He ruled in Conley’s favor in April 2020, saying the sheriff's office cannot charge for the inspection of public records. He ordered the sheriff’s office to create a system that allows Tennessee residents to access redacted arrest records on a current basis.

Weaver wrote the lawsuit didn’t revolve around the actual records requests that had been denied, but rather “involved the navigation of a saga of requests and denials.” He went on to say the litigation was consistently adversarial.

“If there is no reasonable way for the public to access the public records, the public cannot use them to oversee governmental activities," he wrote.

Knox News investigation shows program unlawfully implemented

The 287(g) program was not lawfully implemented in 2017. A joint 2021 report published by Knox News and Compass Knox revealed the sheriff's office didn't secure the Knox County Commission's approval as required by state law.

The report detailed the experience of a man named Omar who was arrested and sent through immigration proceedings in 2018 after he crashed a car and did not have a driver's license. He had no criminal background and did not cause the wreck. His experience is not an outlier.

Research compiled by Conley shows about 85% of the 441 people held at the jail in immigration enforcement actions from September 2017 to May 2020 did not face felony charges and some 81% of arrestees detained for ICE were held on nonviolent charges.

The most common charges for those immigrants were drunken driving (34%), driver's license infractions (20.8%) and public intoxication (10.6%).

Another lawsuit stuck in federal court

In December 2021, Knox News reported Knox County resident Maira Oviedo-Granados filed a lawsuit against the county after she said she dialed 911 while her partner was threatening her and her three children in late 2020.

When police arrived, however, her English-speaking partner, an American citizen, was not arrested. Instead, she was charged with simple assault, a charge later increased to domestic assault, which requires a 12-hour hold in jail.

Oviedo-Granados asserts she was denied access to an attorney while in jail, was processed through the 287(g) system and ultimately separated from her three children for nearly two months. She is suing the county for $2.5 million.

That lawsuit is making its way through the federal court system.

CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of documents the Knox County Sheriff's Office did not turn over to Meghan Conley in response to one of the open records requests she made to the agency. After receiving hundreds of documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement through a federal Freedom of Information Act request, Conley has discovered communication between ICE and the sheriff's office that had not been turned over by the sheriff's office in a similar open records request Conley made to the local agency. She is in the process of cross-referencing documents to see how many were not turned over by the sheriff's office.

Tyler Whetstone is an investigative reporter focused on accountability journalism. Connect with Tyler by emailing him at tyler.whetstone@knoxnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyler_whetstone.

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Legal filing: Knox County sheriff defied judge in public records case