A Baker, a Pastor, and Charlotte’s Stand Against ICE

OVER THE PAST WEEK, a portion of President Donald Trump’s underqualified, overmilitarized immigration police decamped from Chicago and rolled into Charlotte, North Carolina. Last Saturday, they grabbed 81 people; by Wednesday, the number of arrests had passed 250. Siembra NC, an immigrant-rights group that works with people across the state, told me on Thursday that they had received more than 2,000 calls to their ICE hotline just since Saturday, which is more than they typically receive during an entire month.

That Trump’s masked forces were ordered to focus their efforts on Charlotte is notable: It is a city that attests to the growing Latino presence in American society generally. Between 1990 and 2020—in a little over one generation—Hispanics went from comprising 1 percent (6,700 people) of the Mecklenburg County population, which includes Charlotte, to 15 percent (156,000 people). That trend has continued: Over the four years from 2020 to 2024, the Latino presence there has grown a further 22 percent.

It’s these facts more than anything that account for “Charlotte’s Web,” CBP head Greg Bovino’s gracelessly named operation that targeted the city.

Bovino’s playbook is by now as familiar as an old coat. In Charlotte, federal agents waited on popular highways and stopped people who simply looked Hispanic. Locals described to me the way ICE and CBP agents revved up to Home Depots and Compare supermarkets, and how they aggressively questioned people at construction sites and gas stations.

As in other cities, Charlotte has seen its share of American citizens subjected to forcible mistreatment during “Kavanaugh stops,” where federal agents target them because of their race. It is blatant profiling. And it’s exactly what happened to a man named Willy Aceituno.

Aceituno, 46, was grabbing breakfast before his construction job when he was accosted by border patrol agents. Confident that his U.S. citizenship would protect him from the perils of immigration detention, he bantered back and forth with the agents, figuring any time he could get them to waste would allow others nearby extra time to get away. Those agents, as the New York Times reported, eventually allowed him to go.

But after he got in his truck, a second group of agents rolled in and started to harass him, banging on his window. His friend Karina Sanabria told me Aceituno warned them not to break it because he would demand they pay for it. And then they went ahead and broke the window. Two agents pulled him out and threw him on the ground. A passerby recorded the altercation, imploring the agents to leave Aceituno alone because he had already shown his citizenship documentation to the first group of agents.

“They just ID’d him, don’t you guys fucking coordinate?” the passerby asked.

Aceituno had kept his calm while dealing with agents earlier, but after this second group drove him to the ground and then threw him into a van, he started to get scared. Sanabria told me that another detained immigrant who was in the van wept as they were driven around. When he tried to share his wife’s phone number with Aceituno so that he could call her and let her know where he was, the agents started yelling at both men to shut up.

“They were yelling at them treating them like shit, as if he was one of the worst animals, that’s when he got scared thinking these assholes are going to take me somewhere and no one is ever going to see me again,” said Sanabria, who is part of Latino Tu Voto Cuenta, an electoral-focused group in North Carolina.

After Aceituno again told the agents he was a U.S. citizen, they finally threw him out of the van. By then, he was a twenty-plus-minute walk away from his car, which he still could not drive anywhere because the agents had taken his keys. Eventually, someone from a local advocacy group contacted the agents to get the keys back.

(If you want complicated, here you go: Aceituno voted for Trump in 2024 because of the border and the economy. He now calls it “the worst decision of my life.”)

Aceituno and I were going to get on the phone for an interview this week, but we never connected. That’s because each time I checked in, he was either doing an event to bring attention to what was happening in his state or delivering food to people in his city who had become too scared to leave their homes.