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 Democrat 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.
Gregory Bovino, who led hundreds of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in a similar effort in Chicago, took to X to document a few of the more than 80 arrests he said agents had made.
“From border towns to the Queen City, our agents go where the mission calls,” he posted on X, referring to Charlotte.
The effort was dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web” as a play on the title of a famous children’s book.
Some welcomed the intervention, including Mecklenburg County Republican Party Chairman Kyle Kirby, who said in a post Saturday that the county GOP “stands with the rule of law — and with every Charlottean’s safety first.”
The flurry of activity prompted fear and questions, including where detainees would be held, how long the operation would last.
Bovino's operations in Chicago and Los Angeles triggered lawsuits over the use of force, including widespread deployment of chemical agents. Democrat leaders in both cities accused agents of inflaming community tensions.
Bovino, head of a Border Patrol sector in El Centro, California, and other Trump administration officials have called their tactics appropriate for growing threats on agents.
Bovino posted pictures Sunday of people the Trump administration commonly dubs “criminal illegal aliens,” meaning people living in the U.S. illegally who allegedly have criminal records. That included one of a man with an alleged history of drunken driving convictions. Being in the country illegally is in itself a crime.
“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 said.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, did not respond to inquiries about the Charlotte arrests. Bovino's spokesman did not return a request for comment Sunday.
Elsewhere, DHS has not offered many details about its arrests. In the Chicago area, the agency only provided names and details on a handful of its more than 3,000 arrests in the region from September to last week. Dozens of protesters were arrested.
By Sunday, reports of CBP activity around Charlotte were “overwhelming” and difficult to quantify, Greg Asciutto, executive director of the community development group CharlotteEast, said in an email.
“The past two hours we’ve received countless reports of CBP activity at churches, apartment complexes and a hardware store,” he said.
Two people were arrested during a small protest Sunday outside a DHS office in Charlotte and taken to a local FBI office, said Xavier T. de Janon, an attorney who was representing them. He said it remained unclear what charges they faced.
DHS said it was focusing on North Carolina because of sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation between local authorities and federal immigration agents.
Most North Carolina county jail operators have long honored “detainers,” or requests from federal officials to hold an arrested immigrant for a limited time so agents can take custody of them.
But some non-cooperation policies have existed in a handful of places in the state, including Charlotte, where the police do not help with immigration enforcement. In Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, the sheriff previously did not honor detainers but said the jail now does as required under changes made to state law since last year.
"We know that there are more than 1,400 criminal illegal aliens who are in their jails, and they refuse to turn over those individuals to ICE law enforcement," DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsmax on Monday.
Several county jails house immigrant arrestees and honor detainers, which allow jails to hold detainees for immigration officers to pick them up. But Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, does not. Also, the city's police department does not help with immigration enforcement.
DHS alleged that about 1,400 detainers across North Carolina had not been honored, putting the public at risk.
“We are surging DHS law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed," McLaughlin said in a statement.
Newsmax wires contributed to this report.
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