Shelby County’s outgoing mayor said Guard members were no longer working with the Memphis Safe Task Force. Gov. Bill Lee’s office says the mission continues, while federal officials described a patrol pause for administrative work. An autopsy adds new physical evidence to a fatal July 5 shooting but does not determine whether the force was legally justified.
By The Redemption Project Newsroom
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The simplest question about the Tennessee National Guard’s role in Memphis should have a simple answer: Is the deployment ending?
As of Monday morning, three levels of government still had not provided the same one.
Outgoing Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris told WREG on Friday that the Guard was no longer working with the Memphis Safe Task Force. Gov. Bill Lee’s office said the Guard “continues to support” the operation, and the U.S. Marshals Service said Guard personnel remained in Memphis while describing Friday’s halt in patrol activity as administrative work.
State Sen. Raumesh Akbari offered a possible explanation for at least part of the movement. She said she had been told that some Guard members were leaving while replacements arrived as part of a routine personnel rotation. WREG also reported seeing Guard personnel on Beale Street Friday night.
By Monday, the governor’s position had not changed publicly: WKNO reported that Lee’s office said the Tennessee National Guard will remain in Memphis.
Those statements may eventually prove reconcilable. A unit can rotate while a broader deployment continues. Soldiers can remain assigned to a task force while patrol activity pauses or their duties change.
But the public still lacks the document that would settle the question.
TRP has not located a publicly released activation amendment, mission-change order or demobilization order establishing the Guard’s current authorized strength, duties, command relationships and scheduled end date.
That absence matters more now because two Tennessee National Guard members assigned to the task force shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson on July 5. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says its investigation remains open.
An autopsy obtained by The Associated Press adds an important physical fact to that investigation: the single bullet that struck Johnson entered the right side of his back and exited through his upper-right chest. A forensic pathologist who reviewed the report for AP said the trajectory could be consistent with Johnson moving away from the shooter.
That does not, by itself, establish what Johnson was doing at the instant the soldiers fired.
A Tennessee National Guard report obtained by AP says Johnson turned toward the Guard members and pointed a handgun. The autopsy also contains an investigative narrative stating that law enforcement saw him draw a firearm before he was shot. TBI’s own initial public statement was more limited, saying the circumstances that caused the encounter to escalate remain under investigation.
The medical examiner classified Johnson’s death as a homicide. In death-investigation terminology, that means another person caused the death; it is not a determination that a criminal homicide occurred. No charges have been announced.
The result is two accountability questions operating at the same time: What happened during the seconds before Johnson was shot, and what has happened to the Guard’s Memphis mission since?
A patrol pause is not the same as a withdrawal
The most precise federal description available came from the U.S. Marshals Service.
The Daily Memphian reported Friday that Guard members had halted patrols for “administrative work” while remaining deployed as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force. The Marshals Service could not provide certainty about the long-term status of Guard patrols.
That is materially different from a demobilization order.
The distinction determines more than whether residents see uniformed Guard members downtown. It affects what duties soldiers currently perform, who commands them, which policies govern their actions and which state or federal entities are responsible for preserving records and reviewing conduct.
The public therefore needs the timeline behind the personnel movement: when the present rotation began, when patrol duties changed, whether a withdrawal or demobilization decision has actually been made, when replacement personnel arrived and when the overall assignment is scheduled to end.
It also needs the written authority behind those changes.
Interviews and public statements explain what officials say is happening. Activation orders, amendments, mission letters and demobilization orders establish what the government actually authorized.
The original mission left its duration largely to Tennessee
President Donald Trump created the Memphis Safe Task Force through a Sept. 15, 2025 presidential memorandum.
The memorandum directed the secretary of war to request that Tennessee’s governor make National Guard units available under 32 U.S.C. § 502, in the numbers and for the duration the governor considered necessary and appropriate to support public-safety and law-enforcement operations in Memphis. It also directed the attorney general and secretary of homeland security to request Guard support as necessary for the mission.
Under Title 32, Guard personnel generally remain under state command while performing federally funded duty, rather than being federalized under Title 10.
The deployment later became the subject of litigation brought by Harris and other elected officials.
The Tennessee Court of Appeals said the Guard had been mobilized under 32 U.S.C. § 502(f)(2)(A) and Tennessee Code Annotated § 58-1-106(a). The appeals court reversed a temporary injunction because the plaintiffs lacked standing; it did not decide whether every aspect of the Memphis deployment complied with state law.
The opinion also reproduced a notable finding from the trial court.
As of the November 2025 injunction proceeding, the record before the chancellor did not contain a written request from the relevant federal officials to Gov. Lee for activation of the Guard, nor did it contain a written order or memorandum from Lee activating Guard personnel for the Memphis mission.
That does not establish those records do not exist.
It establishes why obtaining the actual activation and subsequent mission documents remains important.
Guard personnel have performed duties close to ordinary police work
The Tennessee National Guard itself has publicly described members helping local officers after shootings, rendering emergency medical aid, securing crime scenes, preserving evidence, taking witness statements and searching for evidence.
In April, Guard public-affairs reports described soldiers assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force protecting shooting scenes and preserving evidence for local police.
Those descriptions do not establish that Guard members possess every authority of a police officer.
They do show that the mission has placed military personnel directly inside situations normally associated with policing and criminal investigations.
That makes the governing rules important: when Guard members may detain someone, what authority governs pursuit, searches and evidence handling, what use-of-force rules apply, what reporting follows a critical incident and which civilian law-enforcement agency ultimately assumes control.
Those questions became concrete on July 5.
The autopsy adds evidence, not a verdict
TBI says Memphis officers were involved in a foot pursuit after encountering Johnson, whom the agency described as armed with a handgun. Nearby Tennessee National Guard members joined the pursuit, and two soldiers fired their weapons during the encounter, killing him.
AP’s later review of the autopsy added the wound path through Johnson’s body.
That finding deserves scrutiny because it adds physical evidence to public narratives describing Johnson turning toward the Guard members with a firearm. But body position is not static during a pursuit, and the path of one bullet cannot establish every movement by Johnson or the shooters before the shot was fired.
Video, scene measurements, firearm evidence, witness statements, trajectories and the soldiers’ own accounts will matter.
TBI’s published policy says its role is to collect the evidence and establish the facts, not decide whether an officer’s use of force was justified. The completed file goes to the district attorney general, who makes the prosecutorial determination.
That also creates an eventual transparency point.
TBI says records from fatal officer-involved-shooting investigations become public after the investigation and the district attorney’s prosecutorial function have concluded.
The public therefore should eventually receive a much fuller evidentiary record than it has today.
One shooting can create several different investigations
The criminal investigation is only one accountability system that may apply.
TBI determines the facts for the district attorney. The Tennessee National Guard can separately examine whether members followed military orders, training and command requirements. Federal task-force leadership can review compliance with mission rules or agreements. Civil litigation could eventually test whether constitutional or state-law rights were violated.
Those reviews ask different questions and can reach different results.
The public does not yet know whether the soldiers had body-worn cameras, whether Memphis police or other task-force personnel captured the encounter on cameras, what precise use-of-force policy governed the two Guard members or what duty status they currently hold.
Those are legitimate questions without assuming what the answers will show.
The state can answer the deployment question without compromising the shooting investigation
TBI has legitimate reasons not to release evidence from an active shooting investigation.
The current Guard mission is a different matter.
Tennessee can identify the current number of Guard members assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force in an appropriately aggregated form, explain whether patrol duties have changed, provide the current rotation dates, identify the mission’s authorized tasks and say whether a demobilization date has been established.
The state also can release or identify the operative activation order and subsequent amendments, subject to redaction of genuinely sensitive operational information.
A written order would answer a question that interviews have not.
Friday, Shelby County’s mayor said the Guard was no longer working with the task force. The governor’s office said it remained assigned. Federal officials described an administrative pause rather than a withdrawal.
As of Monday morning, the state continued to say the Guard remained in Memphis.
Until the governing records settle the disagreement, the responsible description is not that the Tennessee National Guard has left the Memphis Safe Task Force.
It is this:
County, state and federal officials have given the public different descriptions of the Guard’s current status, and the document that could reconcile them has not yet been made public.
Behind the Reporting: The Orders That Could Settle the Memphis Guard Question
Paid subscribers get the evidence ledger, legal framework, shooting chronology, document requests and unresolved accountability questions behind this report.
