Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to Charlotte as a part of his nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration. Despite the operation — referred to as “Charlotte’s Web” — only lasting five days, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol made hundreds of arrests, with masked agents confronting people outside of places like laundromats, grocery stores, construction sites and churches. As of Dec. 3, they have made more than 425 arrests in North Carolina.

As “Charlotte’s Web” continued in Charlotte, it was announced that ICE would be coming to Raleigh on Tuesday, Nov. 18. It was not immediately clear how long their operation in the Triangle would last, nor was it clear where specifically ICE and Border Patrol would be operating. However, as the day progressed, reports of ICE sightings — and detainments — within the Triangle began to pop up on Siembra NC’s Ojo Obrero service. 

Siembra NC is a grassroots nonprofit aiming to help Latino people in North Carolina and to defend them from “abusive employers and landlords, ICE, and bad políticos.” They launched their Ojo Obrero ICE map this year as a catalog of ICE and Border Patrol sightings, incidents and arrests throughout the state. 

Effects on young children

Over 30,000 students — around 20% of the district’s total enrollment — were reported absent from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools on Monday, Nov. 17, and, though it is not confirmed whether or not these absences were because of ICE’s presence in the county, the number of absent students remained over 21,000 for the entirety of the five-day operation.

Durham Public Schools (DPS) also faced similar absence rates, with nearly 30% of students reported absent on Wednesday, Nov. 18.

Tomeka Ward-Satterfield, the director of student wellness and advocacy in the student support department at DPS, said that, despite these absences, it is important to note that there was no reported presence of ICE at DPS schools or bus stops. 

Despite this, families were still prepared for the worst, protecting their children out of an abundance of caution. Wake County Schools and Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools also reported spikes in absences — nearly one in nine Wake County Schools students were reported absent on Nov. 18.

“I was at an elementary school during the period of time where they were here and, y’know, one of the staff reported a parent coming through the carpool line and just pleading with them, ‘Just please keep my child safe, just please keep my child safe,’” Ward-Satterfield said. 

A statement released by the Department of Homeland Security in September asserted that ICE does not raid schools and claimed that “ICE is not going to schools to make arrests of children.” This, however, is not the main concern regarding young people and ICE — one of the biggest impacts ICE has on children is lasting negative mental health effects from their loved ones fearing — or experiencing — detainment.

According to the American Immigration Council, a 2020 study focusing on the families of worksite ICE raids in Ohio, Texas and Mississippi found that the children of detainees showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. 

“A lot of the elementary school students have some idea of what is going on, but, more, what they really are experiencing [is] seeing the confusion and the concern and the fear of their parents,” Ward-Satterfield said. “They may not really understand in detail exactly what’s going on, they just know there’s this feeling of [unease], this feeling of not being safe, and they’re watching the adults around them and feeding off that.” 

Though ICE’s time in the Triangle was short-lived, with the majority of sightings taking place Tuesday, Nov. 18 and Wednesday, Nov. 19, at least three individuals were detained in Durham, and confirmed sightings were reported throughout Raleigh and Durham suburbs. 

This is not the first time ICE has set its sights on North Carolina, nor is it the first time young people were heavily affected by ICE’s presence — in 2016, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas were targets of immigration raids in which ICE detained over 100 women and children from Central America. The Southern Poverty Law Center later filed a complaint alleging ICE used deceptive tactics and threats to enter homes and detain individuals who had conditional permission to reside in the country. 

“I remember similar scares about eight years ago, when friends who worked as [English as a Second Language] teachers told me their elementary kids were scared and crying,” a Durham resident who requested to remain anonymous wrote in an email to The Durham Voice. “This time a friend told me that parents are afraid — no, terrified — to leave their homes because being deported back to their home countries essentially amounted to a death sentence.”

Ward-Satterfield said that DPS is trying to work with students and adjust lesson plans to accommodate for the absences on Nov. 18 and 19. She said DPS has been preparing for this sort of situation since last year, but had no prior warning that ICE would be in Durham.

“Last school year, when these ICE raids first started to pop up we did some initial preparation, then gathered some resources and tried to gather up a good community partner to distribute to families information about knowing their rights,” Ward-Satterfield said. “And thinking through the impacts, like mental health support that needs to be in place for our students — especially support that could be in multiple languages.”

Other local reactions

Older children within the DPS district organized walk-out protests in solidarity with very little notice, drawing massive crowds. On Thursday, Nov. 20, over 200 students participated in a walkout at Durham School of the Arts, a private school within DPS. 

Then, the next day, students across the district organized a walkout in downtown Durham. The city’s tree lighting ceremony was moved in solidarity. 

Organizations like Siembra have begun holding “ICE watch” training events for those seeking help responding to ICE and Border Patrol agent activity in their areas. These events aim to help organize street patrols and neighborhood watch groups. 

In downtown Carrboro, tents were set up advertising free ICE training, and in Charlotte, Gastonia and Hickory, over 2,400 people attended Siembra’s in-person ICE watch trainings, according to a press release from the organization.

Activist groups have also raised concerns that ICE uses excessive force when conducting raids and arrests, and a video from the first day of “Charlotte’s Web” showed an agent shattering the car window of a man who legally immigrated from Honduras.

“I totally understand that we are trying to get the criminals out of the country, but what I’ve been [seeing] is not even close to that, it has got to the point where it even feels so bad to walk to the grocery store just because of my color,” a Triangle resident who asked to remain anonymous wrote in an email to The Durham Voice. 

Many businesses and companies in the Triangle closed or adjusted their operations during ICE’s time in the area, including Latino-owned supermarkets and contracting companies. For some of these businesses, it was to protect their staff, but for others, it was to protect their customers. 

Overall, ICE’s presence in the Triangle has had rippling impacts that will be felt for months. The community continues to monitor ICE and their plans, and there have already been warnings that they may return to the area in the near future, according to Siembra NC. 

Resources

For assistance, individuals can call Siembra NC’s Defensa Hotline at (336) 543-0353.