Places of worship aren’t sacred anymore. One ugly scene in Charlotte: parishioners doing yard work at church fled in terror when immigration agents descended. But community members are pushing back
Reports that the Charlotte, North Carolina region would be the next target of Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation roadshow came to fruition this past weekend, when Border Patrol agents under the watch of noted tear gas-flinger Greg Bovino descended on this community of nearly one million residents to harass American citizens, cause local businesses to shutter, force parishioners to flee church grounds in terror, and tear apart families just days before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Willy Aceituno, a naturalized U.S. citizen, became the latest American to be targeted by the now-notorious “Kavanaugh stops” after he was racially profiled by federal immigration agents and subjected to not one, but two unjust stops within the span of just minutes, the Charlotte Observer reported. Aceituno recorded agents smashing his car window, leaving “scrapes on his elbow and the back of his neck he said he suffered when agents tried to arrest him.” WCNC reported that on Monday, two other U.S. citizens were also arrested after honking their car horns to alert others of Border Patrol’s presence.
As many as 20 parishioners were doing yard work at their local church when agents descended on the area and forced several individuals, including at least one teenaged U.S. citizen, to flee from the church grounds in terror, the Charlotte Observer also reported.
“Inside the church, women and children sobbed as they wondered whether their loved ones had been taken,” the report said. “Some yard workers fled into the surrounding woods when officials arrived, including 15-year-old Miguel Vazquez.” He told the outlet that he thought, “wait, why am I running? I’m a citizen.” The answer to that is that Vazquez is a well-informed teen who knows that if you’re a non-white person in Trump’s America, American citizenship no longer guarantees protection from immigration detention.
A Charlotte pastor said Border Patrol came into his church and made an arrest in front of children. They cried “a lot,” he said.“We are trying to clean the property. We didn’t know this is gonna happen.”#borderpatrol #charlotte #nc
— The Charlotte Observer (@charlotteobserver.com) 2025-11-15T21:56:08Z
Vazquez told the Charlotte Observer that while he’s safe, “he was friends with the man who was taken and worries about the family he left behind.” Church services have also been suspended for now, continuing a trend seen in many Catholic parishes where church leaders have been forced to suspend in-person services in order to protect their congregants. “Right now, everybody is scared. Everybody,” the Charlotte church’s pastor said.
By Common Consent, a Mormon blog, condemned the raid as an “assault on religious liberty” that threatens the freedoms of all people of faith.
“We have aggressively invoked religious liberty and the harms its absence can cause,” By Common Consent said. “And in this Administration, that’s not just a specter and a shadow: the property line of the church has been breached, and its breach has (perhaps irreparably) damaged the protections of religious liberty. If there was a time to speak up, it is absolutely now.”
Meanwhile, in a loss for the area’s economic stability, a Latino business owner said he had no choice but to shut down his bakery for the first time in nearly 30 years in order to protect his employees and customers. “It’s not worth it to take that risk,” Manolo’s Bakery owner Manuel “Manolo” Betancur told the Charlotte Observer. “We need to protect our families and family separation.” Right now he has no idea when he’ll be able to reopen to once again serve his beloved customers. One thing he does know, however, is that this operation isn’t about public safety at all.
American citizen Manolo Betancur, owner of Manolo's Bakery in Charlotte: “They are lying. They are not chasing criminals. They are chasing anyone who speaks like me, has an accent like me, and looks like me.”
— Barbara Kaskosz (@kaskosz.bsky.social) 2025-11-16T03:19:28.355Z
“They’re lying, man,” Betancur continued to the Charlotte Observer. “They’re not chasing criminals. They’re chasing anyone who looks, speaks like me, who has an accent like me, who looks like me.” Per the latest TRAC Immigration data, 71.5% of all individuals in ICE detention have no criminal record at all. “Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”
In a statement over the weekend, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein condemned the raids as discriminatory, adding that “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. Going after landscapers simply decorating a Christmas tree in someone’s front yard. And entering churches and stores to grab people.”
Gov. Stein also said that he agrees that enforcement priorities should target risks to public safety. “But the actions of too many federal agents are doing the exact opposite in Charlotte,” he noted.
Border Patrol’s invasion of the Charlotte area comes after Americans voted earlier this month decisively across the board against Trump’s agenda, with many voters citing the administration’s anti-immigrant policies as their motivation to cast a ballot. On immigration, exit polls asked all voters whether the administration’s “immigration actions” had “gone too far,” and found that strong majorities of voters registered their disgust: in California (63% “gone too far” vs. 12% “not gone far enough”), New Jersey (53-14%) and Virginia (56-14%). And Latino voters trended sharply away from the GOP, due in no small part to immigration.
Yet rather than adjusting course, the administration has only doubled down. On Monday, Raleigh Mayor Janet Cowell said she also expected Bovino to take his state-sanctioned harassment campaign to her city this week. But as former POLITICO editor Garrett Graff writes at his Doomsday Scenario newsletter, the administration’s retreat from Chicago and Charlotte raids should be seen as coming from a place of weakness, not strength.
DHS is “always trying to stay just a couple steps ahead of the judicial orders and court showdowns that have blocked its worst tactics,” Graff wrote. “We’ve seen this pattern now unfold in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and now Charlotte, as well as smaller raids in places like Sacramento, and Bovino’s force has been defeated in each of them. There’s a national trail of court orders left behind in each jurisdiction finding and enjoining their tactics as illegal, unnecessary, and overly violent. In neighborhood after neighborhood, they face resistance and then, literally, pop tear gas canisters and retreat.”
But community members are pushing back too. In Chicago, concerned parents and educators devised a “walking school bus” to help immigrant parents get their children to school, WTTW reported. In the Charlotte area, community members have similarly come together to find ways to help keep families together, including a “Safe to Work, Safe to School” training to help support their immigrant neighbors.
huge turnout in Charlotte tonight for @siembranc.bsky.social’s “Safe to Work, Safe to School” training for people who want to learn how to protect their neighbors from Trump’s mass deportation effort.
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:18:01.416Z
there may well be more citizens showing up here in Charlotte to learn how to peacefully resist Trump’s indiscriminate mass deportation effort than federal agents on the ground here, as we saw firsthand last night.
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T11:09:40.606Z
“Advocates handed out whistles—like those used by many in Chicago in recent weeks—to local residents on Sunday, and hundreds of people packed a training session on Friday night where Carolina Migrant Network advised them on banding together to stop ICE from raiding their communities,” Common Dreams reported. “A grocery store, Compare Foods, also announced it would be offering free delivery to keep people from having to venture out while federal agents are in the city.” Others are also offering rides to immigrant community members who need help getting to school, work, or church. Additionally, Martha White, the granddaughter of “Charlotte’s Web” author E.B. White, slammed DHS for using his iconic book’s name to brand its deportation efforts, The Independent reported. White said her grandfather “certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons.”
Solidarity is what’s needed during these times – and it’s solidarity that’ll get us through these times.
“Allies are learning how to help their neighbors,” Carolina Migrant Network cofounder Stefanía Arteaga told The Guardian. “I think that’s beautiful. In a scenario where this administration is trying to sow division, we see an organic movement of community members trying to provide support and assistance.”
