As ICE activity continues in Nashville and major cities across the U.S., Billy Strings took aim at the federal immigration agency on Friday in his adopted hometown. During the show at Bridgestone Arena, which also included a sit-in from classic rock veteran Edgar Winter, Billy Strings altered the words to his song “Wargasm” to: “It’s no parade seeing ICE on the street / What’s the mission, when’s it gonna end?”
Strings’ first of two nights at the home of the NHL’s Nashville Predators came in the wake of recent conflicting reports from ICE about the purchase of a new detention facility outside Nashville. This week, a spokesperson for the agency said it had purchased a facility in Lebanon, TN, only for another spokesperson to deny it later that day. The mayor of Lebanon has since confirmed that a senior official for the Department of Homeland Security is eyeing property in Lebanon, saying, “They are in the due diligence phase of a feasibility study.”
This week also saw joint in-depth investigative pieces from Mother Jones and the Nashville Banner about how the Republican supermajority-controlled Tennessee state government welcomed ICE into the state. The reports centered around May 2025’s “Operation Flood the Zone”, in which the Tennessee Highway Patrol collaborated with ICE for a weeklong dragnet in majority-Latino neighborhoods, making over 600 traffic stops. From the operation’s first night into the second morning, a vehicle was pulled over every two minutes and 20 seconds, 90 percent of them with a driver who was either Black, Latino, or Middle Eastern…