Davidson County Sheriff Spurns President Trump

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall turned down an invitation to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday.

Hall was among the dozen or so sheriffs the White House said would meet with the president and was one of the few Democrats on that list. The National Sheriffs Association is holding its winter meeting in Washington this week; Hall is a member of that organization's executive committee.

However, Tuesday morning, Hall texted The Tennessean to say that once he learned what would be on the agenda during the sit-down with the president, he decided not to go.

“Yes, there was a briefing with the executive committee about topics and the meeting with Trump,” Hall texted the newspaper. “I became concerned the meeting was going to be supportive of issues such as (the) immigration order and others and made the decision not to go.”

A picture tweeted by the president shows those sheriffs who did attend and, indeed, Hall is not among them.

Hall, who Huffington Post categorized as "reform minded" for, among other things, his support for Metro's marijuana decriminalization efforts, would have been something of an odd-man-out among those who did meet with the president, and not just because of his party affiliation. Among those invited to the White House were Laramie County, Wyoming Sheriff Danny Glick who said, without substantiation, that Islamist terrorists were streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border, and relatively prominent Trump supporters Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and Chester County, Penn. Sheriff Bunny Welsh.

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Though Hall took fire from the left for his department's participation in the controversial 287(g) program, which screened the immigration status of inmates and allowed sheriff's departments to initiate the deportation process, he pulled Metro from the program in 2012, easing the backlash.

Hall was first elected in 2002 and is up for re-election in 2018.

Image via Davidson County Sheriff's Department