Incident gets illegal immigrants escorted trip to Mexican border

A dozen men will be escorted to the Mexican border by immigration agents later this week after an altercation in Franklin.

All the men are here illegally and have agreed to be removed from the country, said Ron Kidd, supervisory special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Nashville.

The incident began at a Mapco Express on Franklin Road near The Factory early Tuesday and ended with officers stopping some of the men involved.

"There were a few who did have proper identification, but most could not produce anything. So we decided to call INS to sort that out," Franklin Officer Melvin Scales said.

Officers detained the dozen men who could not produce any identification or who showed what police thought were false IDs, the Franklin department said.

INS agents, summoned from their office at Nashville International Airport, questioned the men and took them to the Williamson County Jail.

Mary Griffin, a Nashville attorney who handles immigration and criminal cases, said yesterday she was not familiar with the incident, but she cautioned law enforcement agents not to reflexively call INS when dealing with Hispanics in the area.

"I have a problem that we make an assumption that if they don't have an identification on their person that they're illegally here," she said.

Police probably would not have called immigration agents to help with a group of black or white men who could not show identification on the spot, Griffin said.

Franklin officers said the incident Tuesday began as a dispute primarily between a white man and a Hispanic man with a crowd of more than 30 Hispanic men weighing in or watching.

According to police reports, the officers tried to calm the crowd and several of the men left quickly, creating confusion in the parking lot.

Some of the men jumped into moving vehicles. One of the Hispanic drivers appeared intoxicated, Franklin police said.

Another driver refused to stop his truck when ordered by police, they said. Franklin officers arriving at the scene were able to help stop some of the men and ask to see identification.