A top Border Patrol commander praised dozens of arrests in North Carolina’s largest city on Sunday, as Charlotte residents reported a wave of encounters with federal immigration agents near churches and apartment complexes.
The Trump administration has made the Democratic-led city of about 950,000 residents its latest target for an immigration crackdown that it says will crack down on crime, despite fierce objections from local leaders and the fact that the city’s crime rate is steadily declining.
Some businesses in Charlotte chose to remain closed over the weekend, and many areas that were often busy on Saturday afternoons were quiet as people stayed home for fear of anti-immigration raids and actions.
Gregory Bovino, who led hundreds of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in a similar operation in Chicago, took to social media to document some of the arrests which he said had reached more than 80 arrests. He posted photos of people the Trump administration often calls “criminal illegal aliens” in a scathing characterization of people living in the U.S. without legal permission and with criminal records. That included a man with an alleged history of drunk driving convictions.
“We have arrested him and taken him off the streets of Charlotte so he can no longer ignore our laws and continue to drive drunk on the same roads as you and your loved ones,” Bovino wrote on X.
The latest effort by federal law enforcement agencies is called “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a play on the children’s book title but conjuring up an image of people falling into traps.
At Camino, a nonprofit that provides services to Latino communities, some said they were too afraid to leave their homes to go to school, medical appointments or work. A dental clinic the group manages had nine cancellations Friday, spokesman Paola Garcia said.
“Latinos love this country. They came here to escape socialism and communism, and they are hard workers and people of faith,” Garcia said. “They love their family, and it’s so sad to see this community now have this target on their backs.”
Recent operations led by Bovino in Chicago and Los Angeles have led to a wave of lawsuits and investigations into questions about the use of force, including the large-scale use of chemical agents against protesters.
Democratic party leaders in both cities said the presence of officers fueled community tensions and actually led to violence.
Bovino and other Trump administration officials have called the use of force appropriate, citing growing threats to officers’ lives.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees CBP, did not respond to questions about the arrests in Charlotte. Bovino’s spokesperson did not return a request for comment on Sunday.
DHS has not provided many details about who it arrested. In Chicago, for example, the agency provided only names and details on a handful of the more than 3,000 arrests in the metro region from September through last week.
On Sunday, reports of CBP activity in Charlotte were “overwhelming” and difficult to quantify, Greg Asciutto, executive director of the community development group CharlotteEast, said in an email.
“Over the past two hours, we have received numerous reports of CBP activity at churches, apartment complexes and a hardware store,” he said.
Councilor-elect JD Mazuera Arias said the targeting of places of worship was “simply terrible”.
“These are places of refuge for people who are looking for hope and faith in dark times like these and who can no longer feel safe because of the gross violation of people’s right to worship,” he said.
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