Charlotte, North Carolina, is a peaceful, rapidly growing city of more than 960,000 souls. Her population is diverse: approximately 60 percent are white, 22 percent Black, 11 percent Hispanic, 4 percent Asian, and 3 percent scattered among a wide array of others. It is a peaceful city, a great place to raise a family.
But much of Charlotte’s growth has been spurred by international migration, especially from Latin America. She also is largely a Democratic city. Those two factors made it an ideal target for Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. DHS would use it as a city into which it would send masked agents to find and arrest all the undocumented, brown-skinned people it could.
The agents arrived Saturday, and that afternoon my daughter, Laura J. Meier, a county commissioner in Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) who is staying close to the situation, sent this email to the family:
“They are literally stopping people because they are brown. They are driving through neighborhoods walking onto private property where lawn workers are working. They stopped a guy twice within 10 minutes – a citizen for six years. Smashed his windshield. Driving around Latino businesses. All masked.”
Violence was not rare. The manager of a popular grocery store said five of his brown-skinned employees were bringing carts back into the building when several SUVs stopped in front of them. Some of the employees panicked and ran, and the ones who didn’t were arrested. Two border patrol agents entered the store and, while other employees and customers were yelling, dragged an employee in his twenties outside the store, pinned his face into the concrete, and then put him in the back of their vehicle. The agents took two other employees from the store before they drove away. In another case, A woman with her hands cuffed behind her back was filmed being pulled out of a building despite her screaming that she was an American citizen. Other similar cases were reported. By the time night fell, 81 people had been arrested.
As a result of the agents’ raids, a weekend-long flea market that is typically filled with Hispanic vendors was canceled. Nightclubs that play reggaeton music on Saturday nights remained shuttered. Businesses suffered as shoppers stayed home. And Sunday morning, Catholic churches that tend to have many immigrant parishioners, were unusually empty.
Before Saturday ended, 81 brown-skinned people, including American citizens, had been arrested. An immigrant rights group said the tally, reported by a senior Border Patrol official on social media, was the largest number of immigrant arrests in the state’s recent history.
The attacks kept up Sunday, and with Sunday afternoon came another email from Laura to the family:
“My house sitter is from Colombia and I just got home and she got so weepy with me. She has a friend who lives in an apartment on Albermarle Road, and she said ICE agents are all in the parking lot and they feel like obviously they can’t leave. She said that she carries her papers with her, but they’re not asking for identification and she is terrified. I told her if anyone feels unsafe I have space! Including her! She’s a citizen. Her son is a Marine! And she’s terrified!”
Matters got worse Monday. Christopher Lakin, a retired Charlotte physician, notified friends that there was an ugly ICE incident in front of his house in midmorning.
Two women – not migrants — had been shadowing an ICE patrol, blowing whistles to alert people of ICE being in the area. At some point the women pulled in front of the caravan and then drove away. Lakin later learned one of the women was facing surgery the next day and could not afford to be arrested, and that’s why they were leaving.
“ICE pursued them and they ended up on our dead-end street … and pulled into a driveway across the street from us. ICE ordered them out of the car and they refused (and were calling CMPD at the same time — who never came). An ICE agent then smashed the driver’s car window. The women were removed from the car, zip tied, arrested for obstruction, and taken away to ‘the FBI facility.’
“All but one of the agents were masked. One of them said, ‘People are out here interfering with us. We’re trying to round up the dirtbags.’”
The Republicans’ answer to all this?
“We’re grateful to see these brave men and women in federal law enforcement following through on President Trump’s promise to remove violent criminal illegals from our country and those stoking fear about these targeted operations must stop at once.” – Matt Mercer, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party.
Violent? If so, they haven’t shared any evidence of it.
Criminal? Absolutely not. Being here without permission is not a crime, and even though Trump says it is, it isn’t. It is a civil breach only, and by law should be handled in civil courts.
Illegal? Perhaps, sometimes. But we know for certain that many of those arrested are American citizens whose only crime is not being white enough for that bigot Trump. There are laws that must be followed when handling undocumented people, but instead of following those laws Trump is willfully stomping on them.
Back to Laura. Around noon Monday she sent another email to the family:
“Total truth on Republicans. Not a peep out of them. The former chair of the local Republican Party receives my newsletter, and he responded recently that it’s Biden’s fault for letting so many ‘illegals’ in. I asked him if the Republicans cared about immigrants here legally, why not make a statement, at the very least, about that? No response.”
The good news coming out of this mess is that Donald Trump continues to prove he’s a loser. The Charlotte Observer explained it well in a Sunday editorial. It read:
“With every unnecessarily smashed window, every sneer at due process, every federal agent’s smirk at those who are horrified by it all, Donald Trump continues to lose. He loses because this immigration enforcement surge is not really about immigration. If the president really wanted to solve our nation’s border issues, he would work toward broader solutions instead of rounding up whomever he can to hit a big number to show Americans.
“Make no mistake; Los Angeles and Chicago and Charlotte are about the show. They’re about showing supporters that he’s willing to break rules to get things done and break wills to get what he wants. The progressive protests, the videos of immigrants tackled and dragged, the families torn apart? The willingness to inflict pain is part of his power. The cruelty, as it always has been, is the point.”
It’s hard to know what is going on in that twisted mind of Trump. Is he trying to whip up votes by living up to his anti-immigration promises? Is he seriously trying to make the United States a Christian nationalist nation ruled by the richest white people among us? Is he practicing sending federal troops into cities so that next November he can have his goons on the street to strike fear in people’s hearts and keep them from voting, all under the guise of protecting the polls?
Who knows? But one thing is sure. He is failing. The elections on Nov. 4 proved that when Democrats across the nation clobbered MAGA Republicans wherever there was a vote. And his poll numbers continue to sink. Even his numbers on immigration, once his main strength, are now jarringly underwater.
It turns out that Americans, who have long had conflicting feelings about immigration, don’t much like the president’s approach to it. They don’t like being told one thing — in this case, that federal agents are going into cities to target dangerous criminals — then seeing something entirely different. They don’t like people, including American citizens, being confronted and detained simply because of the color of their skin. They don’t like masked federal agents gleefully stomping our core values.
So yes, we are winning. All we need to do is to continue showing up, speaking out, and, most importantly, vote, and we will win. Democracy will be preserved.
- Charlotte Residents Defend Community as ICE Arrives for Latest Trump Immigration Crackdown
- Charlotte Officials Stand Against ICE Raids, Reassure the Community
- Charlotte Brought to a Standstill by Ice Raids
- WATCH: ICE agent sympathizes with protestors but declines to speak due to ‘cameras’
