Here’s Why The Feds Are Targeting Charlotte With Immigration Raids

Federal immigration authorities have descended upon their next target for mass deportation raids: Charlotte, North Carolina, a city the Trump administration says has been operating as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

While Charlotte isn’t a well-known sanctuary like New York or Los Angeles, the Trump administration laments that its leaders have failed to hand over hundreds of illegal immigrant criminals to ICE.

The Department of Homeland Security said there’s roughly 1,400 illegal immigrant criminals sitting in Charlotte’s jails that local authorities are refusing to turn over to federal authorities.

“North Carolina sanctuary politicians are protecting the nearly 1,400 criminal illegal aliens in Charlotte’s jails by REFUSING to turn them over to ICE, ultimately releasing these monsters into North Carolina’s neighborhoods,” DHS wrote on X Monday.

In March, ICE arrested six illegal immigrant criminals who had been released by the Mecklenburg Sheriff’s Office, which ignored federal detainers, according to the agency.

After the operation, there were still 18 other targets “at large who also had detainers that were not honored,” ICE said at the time, adding that they’ve “been unable to locate those individuals, and they remain at large and pose a potential danger to the community.”

Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden cut a partnership with ICE in 2018 that allowed federal agents to enter the jails and take illegal immigrant inmates into custody. Since then, he’s required ICE to provide warrants signed by a judge in order to take in detainees set to be released, according to the Washington Examiner.

McFadden defended that he’s “cooperating” with the law by not honoring detainer requests without judicial warrants, he told the news outlet.

Meanwhile, ICE accused McFadden of adopting a “selective approach” that’s putting public safety at risk.

“While the Sheriff asserts an understanding of what a detainer is and is not, the reality is that declining to cooperate with ICE undermines public safety,” ICE spokesman Lindsay Williams told the Washington Examiner.

“By refusing to notify ICE prior to the release of these individuals, the Sheriff knowingly allows potentially dangerous individuals to evade federal immigration enforcement and to be released back into the community,” Williams added.

The Trump administration deployed Border Patrol agents to Charlotte over the weekend as part of an operation dubbed “Charlotte’s Web,” which has already yielded more than 130 arrests of illegal immigrants with criminal records ranging from aggravated assault to felony larceny, according to DHS.

Protesters have responded by organizing demonstrations to push federal agents out of the city.

North Carolina Democrat Governor Josh Stein condemned the federal operation in a video statement.

“We’ve seen masked, heavily armed agents in paramilitary garb driving unmarked cars, targeting American citizens based on their skin color, racially profiling, and picking up random people in parking lots and off of our sidewalks,” Stein said.

Some locals have also cowered in the presence of the feds.

Roughly 27,000 students were absent from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools on Monday, which was nearly three times the number of absences from one week earlier, according to The Charlotte Observer.

Some local businesses have also shut their doors, fearing that their customers or employees will be targets of the raids.

“I’m not going to risk my customers,” Manolo’s Bakery owner Manolo Betancur told WCNC of his decision to close his business. “Safety is more important than any money, any profits or any economic system.”