After facing a fierce backlash that was manifest in a heated public meeting Tuesday night, Nashville's LGBT Chamber of Commerce has dropped private prison corporation CoreCivic from its membership.

The chamber's board voted to return a $300 membership fee paid by the Nashville-based for-profit prison giant after weeks of standing by the controversial decision to accept them.

The board announced the decision in an email that went out to chamber members on Wednesday morning.

"The voices at our meeting last night were very clear," the statement regarding CoreCivic reads. "Their membership was too much for many in our LGBT community. We heard those concerns and last night our board voted to remove CoreCivic as a member and return their $300 membership fee. While CoreCivic will not be a member of our organization, the reasons we originally accepted their application to join are still true. Every industry has members of the LGBT community who are employees. It’s part of our mission to advocate for them and educate employers on how to support the needs of our community. To both support those employees and to fulfill our mission, we have extended an offer to work with CoreCivic on those initiatives but not as a member."

In the email to members, the board maintains that its initial acceptance of CoreCivic as a member "did not imply a tacit endorsement on how they handle all LGBT issues or condone all of their business practices."

But community members who attended the board's Tuesday night meeting were insistent that, regardless of the board's intention, that is precisely what they would be doing if they allowed the country's most prominent private prison corporation to place an LGBT Chamber sticker on its doors.

People in the crowd held various signs with anti-CoreCivic messages and statements about the folly of aligning with them. Speakers talked passionately about the years of reports and testimony about poor conditions and abuse at CoreCivic prisons, as well as the company's heavy involvement in detaining immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Samantha Rae McAlpine reminded the board about the attempted ICE arrest in Hermitage in July, when agents tried to coax a man and his son out of their car but were thwarted by neighbors and community members.

“Where do you think [they] were headed?" McAlpine said. "CoreCivic gets a quarter of their funding from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They operate a huge number of the facilities on the border where they are processing people and caging them like animals.”

Later, she added: “If you think there is any amount of engagement that will fundamentally change who they are, you are at best naive and at worst maliciously indifferent.”

At one point tensions boiled over and board members threatened to end the meeting altogether.

The Rev. Alaina Cobb, a trans woman, stood up to address the board and removed a rosary she was wearing as she walked closer to the front of the chapel, where board members was seated.

“I wear this in memory of trans women that we lose, many of whom are lost in CoreCivic prisons," she said. "Raped, degraded. It’s where they’ve had HIV. It’s where they’ve died alone, unloved. And I want each of you to look at it and then spit on it.”

As Cobb repeated her demand, two plainclothes police officers who had been standing at the back of the chapel walked forward to stand in between Cobb and the board members. Soon other community members from the crowd had gotten out of their seats and gone forward to put themselves in between the police officers and Cobb. But things quickly calmed down, and the hearing continued.

Ty Brown is the executive director of Nashville Launch Pad, a shelter program that serves young people experiencing homelessness, particularly those who are LGBT.

“What do I tell them when I see them next?" he asked the board. "You all are a place that we can point to and say, ‘Look, there is hope. There are leaders, here are business leaders, here are community leaders, here are political leaders.’ And the chamber is about members who are allies. I don’t know what ally means now.”

Brown said he was willing to stipulate that the board’s intention was good, but urged its members to reckon with the impact of their decision.

Later he posed a question to board members that went without an answer: “How many other organizations involved with the chamber have killed trans women? Just a rough ballpark number. How many others have been responsible for the deaths of trans women?”

The LGBT chamber now follows the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which received an unsolicited sponsorship payment from CoreCivic around the same time, but sent the money back.

Update (5:15 p.m.): CoreCivic spokesperson Amanda Gilchrist emails, taking issue with some of the statements from activists quoted above and issuing a statement on behalf of the company.

Responding to Cobb's statements about trans women in CoreCivic facilities, Gilchrist says:

We're not aware of any transgender individuals who have passed away in our facility. One recent person who was in our care was Roxsana Hernandez, and she was with us for 12 hours. Ms. Hernandez came to Cibola County Correctional Center in May 2018 gravely ill. When she arrived, she went through the intake process which includes a medical evaluation. The medical team made the determination that she needed to be immediately transported to an outside hospital. She was only detained at Cibola for 12 hours (intake area) before being transported to an outside hospital, where she later passed. The New Mexico Medical Examiner's Office determined her cause of death as "multicentric Castleman disease due to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and the manner of death as natural."

She goes on:

It's also false to state that we "operate a huge number of the facilities on the border where they are processing people and caging them like animals." We do not contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or manage any of the agency's temporary holding facilities, which is where the "caging" criticisms stem from.

That's splitting hairs. CoreCivic facilities have been used to house asylum seekers who have been apprehended by ICE, and the company runs other immigrant detention facilities.

As for the LGBT chamber's decision to rescind CoreCivic's membership, here is the company's statement: