Sitting on her living room couch, Yasser Lopez’s mother can’t hold back her tears as she talks about her son.
“I felt an urge to go lay down in his bed because it smells like him,” the gray-haired woman says as her voice shakes.
Lopez’s bed is filled with color and stuffed animals like “Stitch” (from Lilo & Stitch), a pink winking pig, and a Spider Man pillow. A Real Madrid banner and more than a handful of soccer medals hang above the headboard. Across the room, a display of “Hot Wheels” cars, still in their packages, are neatly arranged around the perimeter of a full-length rectangular mirror. There is a dark brown leather couch next to the bed. On it rests Lopez’s unzipped backpack with two pairs of cleats and a clean soccer uniform.
The room has been vacant since Feb. 20 when the 18-year-old high school junior was arrested by immigration agents following a traffic stop as Lopez and three others were on their way to a school soccer game.
The incident raises fresh concerns about the reach and scope of President Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown and reopens questions about the Memphis Police Department’s involvement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Lopez says the traffic stop was initiated when Memphis police pulled him and his friends over “two street lights” away from Memphis Business Academy High School, where he is a student. At the time, he was riding in the back seat of the car, he said in a phone interview from the West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason, Tennessee.
Soon, officers from different agencies “opened (the doors) and took us out by force,” Lopez said.
In a statement released Thursday, Mayor Paul Young’s office confirmed MPD initiated the stop but said officers didn’t call ICE. Repeating what Young has said for months, the statement said the city is not involved in immigration enforcement.
“MPD conducted a traffic stop after a driver failed to stop. During that stop, federal agents monitoring radio traffic responded to the scene. MPD did not request ICE’s presence,” the city said in a statement released by Penelope Huston, Young’s chief communications officer.
“Once on site, federal agents engaged with individuals in the vehicle and made their own determinations. MPD’s role was limited to the initial traffic stop. We do not coordinate with ICE on these types of actions.”
However, Jay Fearnley, Lopez’s attorney, questioned MPD’s actions leading to the arrest, contending that officers aggressively questioned occupants in the car.
“Why did MPD feel like they had the right to make everybody in the car identify themselves? I’m not really sure because in a traffic stop that doesn’t always have to be that way unless they suspect a crime is ongoing,” Fearnley said.
One of the car’s occupants, a 19-year-old student, said that MPD officers said they needed to conduct a vehicle search. The youth, who asked to be identified only by his first initial, “S”, because of fear of retaliation, said the officers contended they smelled marijuana.
“They only said that the car smelled of marijuana and that they would search it, and then after that, we could be … allowed to leave,” S said. Officers found nothing during the search, S said.
The Institute could find no record of any criminal charges or traffic charges filed in connection with the incident.
A U.S. Department of Justice report released in 2024 found that MPD officers at times appear to overstate claims they smelled marijuana in order to gain legal footing to search a vehicle.
S said about “five minutes” after the traffic stop, immigration agents made the scene. According to Lopez, officers surrounded the car. “It was four officers, one in each door,” said Lopez, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua. Lopez and S said officers from different agencies began searching all four students, and asked them to turn off their cellphones and leave them in the car. Officers then split the students into two groups of two and placed them inside MPD patrol cars, Lopez and S said.
Then, officers began searching the car “but they didn’t find anything other than notebooks” and soccer equipment, Lopez said.
Meanwhile, officers began questioning all four teenagers. S said he was interrogated by two federal agents, one female and one male, wearing vests emblazoned with HSI, or Homeland Security Investigations.
“They had a vest, green pants, the woman was wearing a pink shirt and shades,” S said. S said that since he did not have identification on him, two HSI agents began collecting his biometric information.
“They started taking my fingerprints. They took my fingerprints like three times. They took a photo of me,” S said.
After being interrogated, everyone except Lopez was free to go, S said.
Attorney Fearnley said Lopez was further interrogated by a female officer from an unknown agency. Minutes later, the teenager was handcuffed and transported to an ICE office near Memphis International Airport.
Lingering questions
Requests for comment from MPD were unsuccessful.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that immigration agents detained Lopez, “an illegal alien”, with help from “members of the Memphis Safe Task Force.”
“Being in detention is a choice. The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now,” the statement said. “We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”
DHS said in the statement that Lopez came to the U.S. illegally “in December 2022 under the Biden administration.” Lopez’s mother said she and Lopez turned themselves in to DHS officers at the border at the end of 2022 and were allowed to enter the country. However, the pair had not filed for asylum prior to Lopez’s arrest, Fearnley said.
An immigrant rights advocate said Lopez’s arrest is part of a larger pattern of abuse by ICE.
“This is yet another example of how ICE uses insidious means to carry out their harmful agenda, using public information to target our neighbors and create fear,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigration & Refugee Rights Coalition. “It is further proof that the priority of ICE and the task force has always been about power and control and not about keeping Memphis families safe.”
The Institute has requested bodycam footage and radio communications from MPD through the state public records law for Lopez’s arrest but has not yet received any materials.
Fearnley, Lopez’s attorney, said he remains curious about MPD’s involvement with ICE. He points to the case of another client who had a similar encounter with police. “I had one client say that it was, like, it was boom, boom. Like, ‘I was asked a few questions by MPD and within two minutes there was an ICE officer there,’ ” Fearnley said.
A mother’s love
Lopez’s mother said she and her son left their native Nicaragua fleeing poverty and violence.
The day she received the call about her son’s arrest, she was making tamales to sell, she said. It was around 3:30 p.m when her phone rang. She immediately began crying.
She and a friend rushed to the area where Lopez was arrested but when they got there all they saw were MPD patrol cars and THP vehicles. Lopez wasn’t there anymore.
“I was destroyed and scared,” she said.
Nearly five hours later, at around 8:30 p.m., Lopez called his mother from an ICE office. That’s when she learned her son would be transferred to Mason the following morning.
The woman said she now regrets sending her son to school that day: “If I had known that was going to happen, I wouldn’t have let him go to school.”
His mother describes Lopez as a loving son and a dedicated student who dreams of becoming an engineer. “He is dynamic, very happy, very popular, and a person with a huge heart,” she said in Spanish.
She said Lopez has good and bad days inside the detention center. His lawyer has submitted a habeas corpus petition seeking his release and anticipates an answer to his request any day.
Until then, Lopez’s mother anxiously awaits her son’s return.
“In the afternoons, I wait for him, but I know he won’t come. In the mornings, I wake up with a huge emptiness,” she said.
Editor’s note: The name of the Tennessee Immigration & Refugee Rights Coalition was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
