Former Charlotte mayor fears, ‘If you look brown, you’re going down’

The strangest thing about driving around Charlotte, N.C., today was how quiet it was.

In hours of patrolling the city with a Baptist pastor and layman Nov. 17, we began to notice the absence of foot traffic in neighborhoods normally filled with pedestrians, the absence of food trucks and work vans, the lack of yard workers in well-to-do neighborhoods, huge construction sites with no workers present.

And when we stopped for lunch at a Salvadoran restaurant in a community populated with immigrants, we found the “Open” sign lit but the doors locked. Posted on the glass doors were signs warning this private property is off limits to ICE. The server looked at us through the glass, then opened the door and welcomed us to an almost deserted café.

Huge parts of Charlotte are in hiding today while the rest of the city goes about its business seemingly unaware that Donald Trump’s masked ICE agents swooped into the city over the weekend and now have abducted about 200 people — most of whom have committed no crime other than being brown skinned.

The immigrant community in Charlotte is terrified. And with justification. They know what has happened in Los Angeles and Chicago and other big cities that are Democratic strongholds. Residents of Charlotte have a Democratic mayor, Democratic City Council, Democratic county leaders and a Democratic governor.

Crime is actually down, according to the factual reports, but is out of control according to Trump and his soothsayers. And the root of the problem, Trump says, is illegal immigrants.

Except the people being plucked off the street by masked men with rifles are mainly not illegals. Every observer I spoke with said it appears ICE agents are randomly rounding up brown-skinned people all over town with no warrants, no explanations, no mercy.

The person leading this crusade is Greg Bovino, freshly arrived from Chicago, where he and his Border Patrol agents unleashed weeks of terror on the immigrant community.

It is that intentional terror that kept anyone not white skinned indoors and out of sight today and will again tomorrow.

School attendance affected

This morning, we stopped at an elementary school that has a Spanish-language immersion track. White parents concerned about the ICE raids were patrolling the parking lot and marching up and down the sidewalks in a show of solidarity with the oppressed. They wore whistles around their necks to blow as an alert if ICE shows up.

Morning drop-off was much smaller than usual, they reported, and no parents walked their children to school today. Teachers of Hispanic origin were absent. One of the parents told us his wife teaches at another Mecklenburg County school and had only three students show up today — out of 20.

To add insult to injury, this is the week of state-mandated testing in North Carolina schools. So brown and black-skinned children are missing the tests.

Whistle if you can

My traveling companions today were Ben Boswell, the former pastor at Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte who was forced out last year a week after he preached a fiery sermon warning of the dangers of a second Trump administration, and attorney Tim Emry, a former deacon at Myers Park. Both men are involved in a church plant called Collective Liberation Church. Boswell is part of a coalition of Charlotte clergy who stepped up to patrol the city as long as ICE is occupying it. Their role is to document ICE appearances and apprehensions, feeding information into a database that populates a real-time app. The clergy are among hundreds of Charlotte citizens volunteering as patrols. They all wear necklaces with whistles.

That’s a tactic the Charlotte protesters learned from friends in Chicago. And it appears highly effective. Volunteers reported ICE agents often drove away after they started blowing whistles to alert everyone nearby what was happening.

One of those clergy volunteers today was Kate Haynes Murphy, pastor at The Grove Church in Charlotte. She was joined on patrol by Laura Byrch, a United Methodist pastor from Boone, N.C., about two hours away.

Both pastors joined the patrol to stand with immigrants they believe are being wrongly targeted and tormented by the Trump administration.

Tonight, another training session is offered for anyone wanting to be certified in how to respond to the ICE invasion.

‘We stand with immigrants’

One of the most visible symbols of Charlotte’s vibrant immigrant community is a Latin bakery called Manolo’s. On Saturday, owner Manolo Betancur closed the bakery for the first time in 28 years in order to keep his customers safe. He’s not sure when he’ll reopen.

We stopped by the bakery and found an array of well-wishers and protesters in the parking lot, and Manolo was giving an interview to a reporter. He looked sad and defeated.

It was in that parking lot that I met former Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, who was holding a homemade sign that read “We Stand with Immigrants.”

“What’s going on here is support for our immigrant community,” she said. “What’s going on in Charlotte is a terrorism-style presence of Customs and Border Patrol who are the most harsh of the immigration services. They’ve hardened their ideas to create fear, and they’re doing a good job of that.”

As a result, she said, “kids at schools are terrified because their friends and neighbors are having their dads and moms taken away by masked men with no identification. They’re afraid to go to school, they’re afraid to go out of their rooms. The parents are crying.”

Trump’s masked agents “are detaining people based on racial profiling,” she said. “If you look brown, you’re going down. They’ve gotten citizens, they’ve gotten legal residents, they’ve gotten workers, they’ve gotten parents caught in the net, without operating legally, based the law. They’ve gone on private property. They don’t have warrants; they’re supposed to have a warrant signed by a judge. … They won’t show anything. They won’t give their names.”

“That’s against the law. … This is not the way you create a safer community.”

Trump’s ICE agents are vandals who are destroying peoples’ property, she added. “That’s against the law. … This is not the way you create a safer community. This is not the way you find people who have outstanding warrants. If you have an outstanding warrant, you should know their address. You should know where to serve the warrant. You don’t go indiscriminately around neighborhoods and schools. They’re at the school carpool drop-off line, just outside of the school property, waiting for parents.”

On the other hand, Roberts had high praise for Charlotte citizens who are coming out in force to protect their immigrant neighbors. “I’ve seen an incredible coming together of community members,” she said.

“Moms, let me tell you, moms are the fiercest. They are Mother Bears. They do not want their children’s education compromised. They do not want their children’s friends being terrorized and taken away. The moms are out there, which is great.”

She also praised small-business owners and nonprofit leaders who are coming together in solidarity.

Trump’s deportation campaign is bad for the local and U.S. economy, she said. “This is raising prices. This is hurting people who aren’t going to have income coming in.”

Why Charlotte?

Most of all, I wanted to know, “Why Charlotte?” What is it about North Carolina’s largest city that makes it a target for Trump’s terror?

Her answer was swift and unequivocal: “It is punishing a Democratic city. It is all for shock and awe. It’s for show … because Charlotte has a Democratic governor, a Democratic mayor, a Democratic city council. … We have a large immigrant population, and we are an easy target.

“The other thing, don’t forget: We have a very important U.S. Senate race and the Democratic contender is leading in the polls, and they want to change that.”

Schools and churches

While we were talking, another woman came up to greet the former mayor. She was Melissa Easley, a local school board member.

“Our teachers are ready to jump into action,” she told me. “I can’t tell you how many teachers I got phone calls from or messages from. I was a teacher for 10 years.”

From the district’s perspective, it’s important for teachers to know the school board has their backs, she suggested. “We want our staff to know they are not making this decision. If ICE does come, they are to shut their door. They are to follow instructions from their school. Our schools are not the ones that make the decision; our legal department is. So that has taken a burden off our principals.”

Charlotte-area churches, however, may not be as fortunate. At The Grove Church, Pastor Murphy faced a quandary when six ICE vehicles were left parked on church property one day. She was tempted to have the vehicles towed, but church lay leaders reminded her their congregation runs a free after-school 80% of students are Latino. They didn’t want to draw the wrath of ICE agents who could terrorize their students and families.

Armed agents “staged an operation” at Central United Methodist Church when preschoolers were being picked up, according to a statement from the Western North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church. “While no one was detained and the agents eventually departed without incident, their presence on sacred ground disrupted the peace and instilled fear among staff, children, families and congregants.”

As with all things Trump, churchgoers and church leaders express diverse opinions on the immigration roundup. I asked Easley, the school board member, what she thought of the response of Charlotte’s churches.

“I’m really disappointed, to be honest, that there are not more churches responding. … I’m really disappointed, but I’m also not surprised in some cases because religion is really ingrained here.”

Political commentator John Pavlovitz, who lives in nearby Wake Forest, N.C., posted on Facebook to his 48,000 followers: “If you attend a NC church and they aren’t loudly and clearly opposing ICE, leave that church. They have no interest in Jesus.”

Mom arrested

Monday afternoon, we drove to the FBI field office in Charlotte because we had been alerted to an incident that happened a few hours earlier. One of the moms in the protest group was driving behind an ICE SUV and began honking her horn at them in protest. The ICE agents followed her to her home and sought to arrest her in her own driveway.

A neighbor noticed what was going on and began capturing video of the incident on his cell phone, which was immediately posted to Facebook. That video is shocking and graphic. When the mom refuses to get out of her car, the ICE agents use the butt of a rifle to break the window and extract her.

She was arrested and taken not to the local police station but to the FBI field office, a steel-fenced fortification in an otherwise normal-looking business park. We sat in our car for an hour and watched who came and went from the policed gates of that building. What we saw was equally shocking.

All those dark SUVs spotted around Charlotte as ICE agents capture people off the streets — they were coming and going in large numbers through those gates. It appeared they were dropping off at least some of the abductees at the FBI building.

That answered one question we had wondered about: Where have they taken the 200 or so people arrested in Charlotte in three days? This city has no ICE detention facility like Chicago does.

We got more insight into this matter when we met an attorney who attempted to represent the mom — and two others — arrested Monday and taken to the FBI building. He had been allowed entry and talked to FBI officials about the women but was sent away because they had not finished gathering all the evidence and — frankly — didn’t know what to do. The FBI, he said, was not happy about getting mixed up in the business of ICE.

Charlotte residents who are paying attention have more questions than answers right now. But sadly, not all residents of Charlotte are paying attention. Life goes on. Most businesses are open. Traffic is still really bad.

The clergy I spoke with Monday all had one big question in common: “What will it take?”

What will it take, they wondered, for enough people to wake up to the terror being inflicted on the city’s immigrant community that they will rise up and demand something better?