A top Border Patrol commander is touting dozens of arrests in North Carolina’s largest city on Sunday as Charlotte residents report encounters with federal immigration agents near churches and apartment complexes
A top Border Patrol commander touted dozens of arrests in North Carolina’s largest city on Sunday as Charlotte residents reported encounters with federal immigration agents near churches, apartment complexes and stores.
The Trump administration has made the Democratic city of about 950,000 people its latest target for an immigration enforcement surge it says will combat crime, despite fierce objections from local leaders and down trending crime rates.
Gregory Bovino, who led hundreds of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on a similar effort in Chicago, took to social media to document a few of the more than 80 arrests he said agents had made. He posted pictures of people the Trump administration commonly dubs “criminal illegal aliens,” for people living in the U.S. without legal permission who have alleged criminal records. That included one of a man with an alleged history of drunk driving convictions.
“We arrested him, taking him off the streets of Charlotte so he can’t continue to ignore our laws and drive intoxicated on the same roads you and your loved ones are on,” Bovino wrote on X.
The effort was dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web” as a play on the title of a famous children’s book that isn’t about North Carolina.
But the flurry of activity immediately prompted fears and questions, including where detainees would be held, how long the operation would last and what agents’ tactics — criticized elsewhere as aggressive and racist — would look like in North Carolina.
