Three weeks ago, the Attorney General of Tennessee, Herbert Slatery,
agreed to meet with Stephanie Teatro and one of her colleagues from the
Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition in his office, in
Nashville. Slatery was one of ten Republican state attorneys general who
had threatened to sue the federal government if Donald Trump didn’t
dismantle Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era
policy that offered protection from deportation for eight hundred
thousand undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. The meeting was scheduled to take
twenty minutes, but it lasted an hour. “What we didn’t want was a legal
conversation. We talked about the devastation that ending DACA would
cause young people,” Teatro told me. “Our takeaway from that meeting was
that he was struggling with how his decision would affect people’s
lives, that it could turn them upside down,” she said.

Last year, on the campaign trail, Trump had promised to end DACA, but
once he was in office and seemed to grasp the policy’s widespread
popularity, he wobbled.
In June, Slatery and the other attorneys general imposed an arbitrary
deadline to keep him to his word: if Trump didn’t cancel DACA by
September 5th, they would challenge the policy in court. On Tuesday, the
appointed day, the U.S. Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, formally announced that the Administration would end DACA because it was legally
indefensible. The state attorneys general had won.

But something unexpected happened in the final hours of Trump’s
deliberations. Late last Friday, just when success looked all but
assured, Slatery publicly pulled out of the anti-DACA effort. “Our
office has decided not to challenge DACA in the litigation, because we
believe there is a better approach,” Slatery wrote in a letter addressed to Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. “There is a human element to this . . . that is not lost on
me and should not be ignored. Many of the DACA recipients, some of whose
records I reviewed, have outstanding accomplishments and laudable
ambitions, which, if achieved, will be of great benefit and service to
our country.” He concluded the letter by encouraging the senators to
vote for the DREAM Act, a bill that went even further than DACA; it
would put Dreamers on a path to full citizenship.

In Tennessee, Slatery’s statement came as a surprise. Hard-line
conservatives attacked him as a shifty moderate, and there were rumors
that members of his staff were reeling. (Since his decision, Slatery has gone silent, and he declined several requests to
be interviewed for this article.) Even those who celebrated the decision were stunned by the forcefulness of Slatery’s disavowal. In 2014, he joined twenty-five state officials who successfully sued to block another Obama-era policy, designed to protect the undocumented parents of citizen children from deportation. His stance was doctrinaire and
inflexible: as a constitutional matter, he argued, Barack
Obama had overreached in creating these policies. To the
immigrants’-rights advocates in the state who spent the last few months
trying to influence Slatery’s position, his letter was a
vindication of their efforts. “He did everything we hoped for, and at
such a strategic moment,” Teatro told me. “There’s probably a temptation
to write off the states involved in the campaign against DACA. But we didn’t
think the campaign reflected the values of Tennessee, and we didn’t think
this level of attack should be normalized in our state. People support DACA recipients here.” Teatro believes that Slatery’s letter also gives cover to Tennessee’s senators. “We didn’t want our senators to feel
uncomfortable challenging the Attorney General,” she said. “If the
state’s official position is against these kids, it will it make it
harder for Senator Corker to support the DREAM Act. He’s up for election next year.”

Immigration politics in Tennessee are complicated—and changing. The
state has one of the most conservative legislatures in the country and a
small—though rapidly growing—immigrant population. Some of the harshest
recent anti-immigrant legislation in the country has emerged in
Tennessee, from bills punishing the undocumented to measures aimed at
curtailing the resettlement of refugees. Yet two-thirds of Tennesseans
now support a bill that would allow undocumented students who grew up in
the state to qualify for in-state tuition at public universities. And
the measure recently came within a single vote of passing the state
assembly, where it was sponsored by a Republican named Mark White. “Some
issues are not about politics,” White told me. “This is not an immigration
issue; it’s an education issue. You have these wonderful individuals
graduating from Tennessee high schools.” Slatery, along with the
governor, had supported the in-state tuition bill; in White’s view,
Slatery’s original decision to join the anti-DACA effort had been more
surprising than his eleventh-hour defection.

After Slatery’s reversal Friday, there was speculation that Bill Haslam,
the state’s Republican governor, who many believe is eying a run for
national office, may have been behind it. Slatery’s office denied this,
but conservative state Republicans have always considered Slatery and
the governor to be allies. Last September, Haslam, who is in his second
and final term, changed his stance on the resettlement of Syrian
refugees in the state, conceding, after earlier objections, that the
federal government was properly vetting them. And when the state
legislature passed a resolution calling on the Attorney General to sue
the federal government over the refugee-resettlement program, Slatery
declined to pursue it.

Slatery’s position on refugee resettlement gave hope to Teatro and her
allies. “We knew he could be reasoned with,” she said. It also helped
that Slatery didn’t have a reëlection campaign to think about—in Tennessee,
unlike in most states, the Supreme Court appoints the Attorney General.
“The position is less of a launch pad for ideologues,” Domenic Powell, a
researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who studies immigration legislation at the state level,
told me.

Over the last few years, immigrants’-rights advocates like the Tennessee
Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition have successfully lobbied
against more than a hundred and fifty pieces of anti-immigrant
legislation. “The Republican Party is not monolithic here,” Teatro said.
“We try to raise the cost politically of taking on and championing these
anti-immigrant policies. We want to make it harder for people to feel
like they can support these things. National far-right groups have been
trying to use our state as a testing ground. We stress to legislators
that these people are outsiders and part of a national fringe.”

All summer, advocates in the state staged demonstrations, met with state
officials, and shared their stories with the press. “It was about adding
a human element to a hyper-politicized policy,” Teatro said. “But we
also got people’s employers to talk. The idea was that it’s getting
harder and harder to claim that ending this policy is in the state’s
best interest.” The state had recently faced a teacher shortage, and
advocates emphasized how many DACA recipients work in schools. One of
the leading organizers was a twenty-three-year-old high-school Spanish
teacher named Evelin Salgado, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when she
was ten and has had DACA for the last four years. “I shared my story
right outside Attorney General Slatery’s office,” she told me. “We are
doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers. That’s who’s being directly affected
by this. We needed to let him know who we are.”

Congress now has a six-month window in which to act to protect Dreamers
from deportation. Many believe that the effort is futile, as lawmakers
have spent the past decade and a half failing to compromise on
immigration policy. Activists like Teatro see a lesson to be learned
from the recent events in Tennessee. “The Attorney General of Tennessee
is an important example of winning. It’s proof that picking tough
fights is worth it,” Teatro said. “We’ve tried to hold a mirror up to
the moderates. Once Republicans stop thinking like a bloc, they do take
seriously the responsibility to govern wisely.”