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immigration
'Time for Them to Leave': Charlotte Communities Rise Up Against ICE Invasion
"I want to keep my neighbors protected because they deserve protection and they deserve to live in a world where they’re not scared," said one woman patrolling the streets of Charlotte with a whistle.
Nov 20, 2025
Backlash against the Trump administration's assault on immigrant communities—in which some US citizens are also getting caught up—is growing in Charlotte, North Carolina this week, as over 30,000 students staged walkouts to protest the federal invasion, people rallied to condemn the arrest of day laborers, and communities mobilized to protect their friends and neighbors targeted by federal agents.
Hundreds of people gathered outside the Home Depot on North Wendover Road Wednesday morning, lining both sides of the street, holding signs supporting immigrants and denouncing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, and cheering as motorists honked in support.
The protest came on the fifth—and reportedly penultimate—day of Operation Charlotte's Web, which the Department of Homeland Security claimed targeted the "worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens." The Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office said Thursday that it has been informed by federal officials that Operation Charlotte's Web has wrapped up.
The administration's "worst of the worst" claim does not seem supported in the vast majority of the hundreds of arrests made in the Charlotte area, as ICE and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have targeted locations including a church, grocery stores, construction sites, homes, and hardware store parking lots where day laborers gather every morning in search of work.
“From guns being drawn on pedestrians, windows broken at restaurants and US citizens being detained and later released, it is clear that CBP's main mission is to disrupt public safety and everyday life in Charlotte,” Zamara Saldivar of the Carolina Migrant Network told WFAE at the Home Depot protest.
Protester Norm Perreault told the Charlotte Observer that "they say they’re deporting the worst of the worst, but day laborers are the best of the best.”
“We are here to support the immigrant community,” said former Charlotte mayor Jennifer Roberts.
Story here: https://t.co/SWSMzj8oSR pic.twitter.com/2GBG3TXbkL
— WBTV News (@WBTV_News) November 19, 2025
Former Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, was also at the Home Depot demonstration, where she declared: "We are here to support the immigrant community. We know they’re an integral part of our economy, education, culture, and growth."
“It’s time for them to leave,” Roberts said of the federal invaders. “We need business to get back to normal. We need our schools to be able to educate our children.”
On Monday, an estimated 30,000 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students walked out of their classrooms in protest of the crackdown. Students marched, held signs, and chanted messages including, "No borders, no nations, stop the deportations!"
"It's stressful seeing my mom 'cuz, like, she struggled with bills already going to work. I mean, even without her going to work, she's struggling even more." said one unidentified student protester from East Mecklenburg High School told WCNC, discussing his family's fear of being targeted during the crackdown.
Another unidentified East Mecklenburg High student lamented "little kids losing their parents by ICE and getting taken, seeing them cry, and that, like, it breaks my heart seeing them like that."
East Mecklenburg High multilingual teacher David Gillespie told WJBF that “a school should be a safe place for a child to come. They should be able to come here to get their education, they should be able to come here and spend time with their friends, socialize, they should feel secure.”
“I’m not sure which of my students I’m going to see again," Gillespie said in a separate interview with WCNC. "Whether because their parents were involved in detainments or because their parents have to make that unfortunate safety calculus—Is it worth it to send my kids to school and put myself at risk?”
Parent Portia James told WBTV that she supports the walkout as an avenue for "students to be able to say something and voice their opinion in a positive way."
"This is not the kind of behavior that we want in Charlotte going forward," James said of the federal crackdown.
This week's demonstrations followed Saturday's "No Border Patrol in Charlotte" rally and march, which drew thousands of protesters to First Ward Park and the city's streets.
Concern is also growing over federal agents arresting and terrorizing US citizens who legally follow, monitor, and record their activities. Vigilant residents have been confronting federal agents, shouting, blowing whistles, and recording them. Federal agents have also seized US citizens who've shown proof of their citizenship.
"Our country is facing a constant constitutional assault unlike we've experienced in many decades," David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said on X Wednesday. "Don't give an inch of your freedom."
Undaunted, some democracy defenders have taken to mocking the invaders:
ICE IN CHARLOTTE NC‼️ This is the appropriate energy needed for this moment in history‼️ pic.twitter.com/bzdFLSWLyt
— Meidas_Charise Lee (@charise_lee) November 19, 2025
Others are mobilizing to resist the invasion and protect their immigrant relatives, friends, and neighbors. Residents have formed volunteer patrols, parents and educators have monitored schools and surrounding areas for agents, and church parishioners armed with whistles are alerting community members when “la migra esta aquí"—the immigration agents are here.
On Saturday, Manolo's Latin Bakery, which has operated in Charlotte for 28 years, was rocked as federal agents in tactical gear chased, tackled, and arrested people outside the business.
“I have seen these people in SUVs, cars that are not marked with their faces covered... throwing immigrants to the floor and taking them away,” owner Manolo Betancur told Queen City News on Saturday, saying he would temporarily shut down his business.
“I’m going to close the door right now," he said. "Yeah, I’m not going to risk my customers... I don’t want to risk myself even though I am an American citizen. Because the way they look, because they’re way that my accent, because the way that I talk, they’re just going to throw me down to the floor."
Local resident Beth Clements told CNN Thursday that she's been outside the bakery for three days wearing a yellow vest and whistle.
“I’m going to walk the streets with my whistle," she said, "and I want to keep my neighbors protected because they deserve protection and they deserve to live in a world where they’re not scared."
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Prosecutors Abruptly Drop Charges Against Woman Shot by Border Patrol Agent in Chicago
US attorneys offered no justification for their sudden decision to dismiss the case.
Nov 20, 2025
Federal prosecutors on Thursday moved to drop criminal charges against Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot multiple times by a US Border Patrol agent last month in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood.
As reported by local news station WTTW, prosecutors filed a one-page motion asking the court to dismiss the indictment against both Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, who had been accused of assaulting a federal immigration officer by intentionally ramming their vehicle into the officer's car.
The US attorneys who filed the motion to dismiss offered no further explanation for their decision to drop the case.
In the indictment, prosecutors alleged that Martinez and Ruiz were part of a larger group of people in cars that was trailing immigration officers' vehicles as they conducted operations in Brighton Park.
Prosecutors said that the Border Patrol agent who shot Martinez had been acting in self-defense, and that he had only opened fire after Martinez's car collided with his vehicle.
However, recently uncovered text messages showed the Border Patrol agent apparently bragging about shooting Martinez, as he boasted that he "fired five rounds and she had seven holes" in a message sent to fellow agents.
An attorney representing Martinez claimed last month that he had seen body camera footage that directly undermined the US Department of Homeland Security's claims about how the shooting unfolded.
Gregory Pratt, an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, said the dismissal of the case was yet more evidence that the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement operations appear to be backfiring.
"This follows several dropped prosecutions against protesters," he wrote on Bluesky. "To say the immigration raids have been all around mess is an understatement."
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Secret ‘Mass Surveillance Network’ by Border Patrol Tracks 'Suspicious' Driving Patterns of Americans
The Border Patrol is engaging in "dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities," charged one critic.
Nov 20, 2025
The Associated Press has exposed what it describes as a "mass surveillance network" being run by the US Border Patrol that is increasingly ensnaring US drivers who have committed no crimes.
In a report published on Thursday, the AP revealed that the Border Patrol has been using a "predictive intelligence program" that surveils and flags drivers as suspicious based solely on "where they came from, where they were going, and which route they took."
The Border Patrol then passes this information on to local law enforcement officials, who will then pull over the targeted vehicles based on flimsy pretexts such as minor speed-limit violations, having tinted windows, and even having "a dangling air freshener" that purportedly obstructs drivers' views.
From there, the drivers are subjected to aggressive questioning and vehicle searches that in some cases have resulted in arrests despite no evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the drivers.
To illustrate this, the AP told the story of Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a truck driver whose work entails "transporting furniture, clothing, and other belongings to families in Mexico" across the US border.
After Gutierrez Lugo's driving routes got him flagged by the surveillance system, he was pulled over in southern Texas by local law enforcement officials, who proceeded to search his vehicle for contraband.
Although officials found no illicit goods in his truck, they nonetheless arrested him on suspicion of money laundering because he was in possession of thousands of dollars in cash. However, Luis Barrios, who owns the trucking company that employed Gutierrez Lugo, explained to the AP that customers who receive deliveries often pay drivers directly in cash.
Although no criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo, Barrios nonetheless said that his company had to spend $20,000 in legal fees to both clear his driver's name and to return company property that had been impounded by police.
The AP notes that operations such as this are symbolic of "the quiet transformation of [the US Border Patrol's] parent agency, US Customs and Border Protection, into something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation."
Former law enforcement officials also tell the AP that the Border Patrol has gone to great lengths to keep its mass surveillance program a secret by trying to ensure that it is never mentioned in court documents and police reports. In fact, the Border Patrol in some cases has even dropped criminal cases against suspects for fear that details about the mass surveillance program would be revealed at trial.
In a post on X, journalist Mike LaSusa remarked that this Border Patrol program represents "another example of powerful, invasive, mass surveillance tech being wielded by US immigration authorities." He added that "so much about these programs is hidden from the public, making it difficult to know whether they keep Americans safe or violate privacy protections."
The program has been increasingly expanding from the border regions of the US into the interior of the country as well, and it discovered that US Customs and Border Protection "has placed at least four cameras in the greater Phoenix area over the years, one of which was more than 120 miles (193 kilometers) from the Mexican frontier, beyond the agency’s usual jurisdiction of 100 miles (161 kilometers) from a land or sea border."
Additionally, the AP found that the program is "impacting residents of big metropolitan areas and people driving to and from large cities such as Chicago and Detroit, as well as from Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston to and from the Mexican border region."
Nicole Ozer, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, told the AP that US Customs and Border Protection is engaging in "dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities" while "collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know."
“These surveillance systems do not make communities safer," Ozer emphasized.
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