Good evening. The Trump administration brought a high-profile Border Patrol operation to a purple state, and tonight, we look at the politics. We’re also covering how the Department of Homeland Security’s focus on immigration has eroded its ability to carry out other parts of its mission. We’ll start with the headlines.
The immigration crackdown hits a battleground state
The last time Gregory Bovino made national headlines, the high-profile Border Patrol official appeared to be lobbing a canister of tear gas into a crowd of Chicagoans. It was the kind of aggressive confrontation — one for which a judge later admonished him — that made him a MAGA star as he became the face of President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles and Chicago, two symbols of blue America. Over the weekend, Bovino turned up somewhere different, my colleagues Eduardo Medina and Bernard Mokam reported: a Home Depot parking lot in Charlotte, N.C., flanked by more than a dozen federal agents. When a woman asked what they were doing, a masked agent said they were searching for criminals. The Border Patrol operation in Charlotte, which continued today, has included agents fanning out across immigrant enclaves in one of America’s fastest-growing cities. It resulted in at least 130 arrests through Sunday and, as Eduardo noted, it startled people in a place where business reigns supreme. It also brought one of the Trump administration’s showiest crackdown strategies into a purple state — creating a rare test of one of his core priorities in fiercely contested political territory. “There is going to be a political response to this,” said Edwin Peacock III, a moderate Republican on the Charlotte City Council who lost his race for an at-large seat in this month’s elections. “If it’s anything like last Tuesday night, I can assure that it’s not going to be a good night for anyone in the Republican Party if this kind of activity continues to haunt American cities.” A county where Trump had made 2024 gainsMecklenburg County, which contains Charlotte, has for decades drawn large numbers of Latino immigrants. The city itself has major corridors that are filled with Hispanic businesses and churches — places that were quiet over the weekend. It is one of North Carolina’s largest Democratic strongholds — the other is Wake County, which includes Raleigh and parts of the state’s university-rich Research Triangle — but it’s a place where Trump made gains in 2024 after the county shifted ever more toward Democrats in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. He may have been helped, in part, by his improved performance with Latino voters. In 2020, exit polling found that Trump won 42 percent of Latino voters in North Carolina, compared with 57 percent for Joe Biden. By 2024, the same exit polling suggested that Trump’s standing with Latino voters had improved: He won half of the state’s Latino voters, compared with 49 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris. None of that helped Peacock on election night a couple of weeks ago. Peacock lost his race for an at-large seat by more than 40,000 votes as voters turned out to rebuke Trump. He thinks immigration raids like the one over the weekend will make it even harder for Republicans to win support in bluer parts of the state — which could affect his party’s overall performance in the midterms, when North Carolina will hold a marquee Senate race. “The White House is clearly calculating that, ‘We have a mandate to do this,’ and I don’t disagree with that — they do — but there’s obviously a consequence,” Peacock told me today. Complex immigration politicsOfficials with the Department of Homeland Security said their goal with the Charlotte raid was to “target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to the Tar Heel State because they knew sanctuary politicians would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets.” That could be a swipe at the sheriff of Mecklenburg County, who has clashed with the department over its policies for the jailing of undocumented immigrants. Tariq Bokhari, a Republican former Charlotte city councilor who worked for the Federal Transit Administration earlier this year, said he hoped the raid would prompt local officials to take immigration enforcement more seriously. “I can only hope that the strategy is, showing everyone, you don’t want this, do you?” Bokhari said. America’s immigration politics are complicated. A poll taken by The New York Times and Siena University this fall found that a majority of voters favored deporting illegal immigrants, but that they thought Trump’s methods had gone too far. (Bovino, of course, has become a symbol of those aggressive methods.) A different Times poll, taken in January, found that 87 percent of voters supported deporting immigrants who were here illegally and had criminal records, but that support for deportations fell when voters were asked about deporting a broader pool of immigrants. That poll found that only 55 percent of voters supported deporting all immigrants who are in the country illegally. At times, Trump himself has seemed uncomfortable with immigration raids that target work sites — rather than focusing more precisely on criminals — like when he largely paused raids in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants earlier this year. Advocates for immigrants in Charlotte say the agents appear to be casting a wide net. They told Eduardo that the people approached or arrested by law enforcement agents included a landscaper putting up Christmas decorations, a person participating in a church cleanup day, and a U.S. citizen whose truck windshield was smashed by an agent. Bovino, for his part, has posted eight photos on his X account of detained immigrants that he said had criminal records. The Department of Homeland Security has not said exactly how many of the people it has detained in Charlotte have committed crimes — and some Republicans believe that could shape the way the public views what happens there. “Most people don’t like cooks and landscapers being taken off the streets,” said Patrick Sebastian, a Republican strategist and pollster in the state. “They don’t mind people who have the audacity to be here illegally and commit crimes being taken away.” More immigration coverage:
QUOTE OF THE DAY “Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative.”That’s how Dena Robinson described her role as a former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Justice Department. Robinson is one of 60 former Justice Department lawyers who spoke to my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser about their experience there as Trump officials took control. She characterized the department as having become “Trump’s personal law firm.” Got a tip? IN ONE GRAPHIC
How the D.H.S.’s mission has been disruptedPresident Trump’s push for the Department of Homeland Security to expand its immigration crackdown has diverted thousands of agents from their normal duties, undermining a wide rage of law enforcement. My colleagues spent months poring over documents and interviewing current and former D.H.S. officials to identify six core areas that have been disrupted by the crackdown. Child exploitation: Significant numbers of agents trained to investigate sex crimes against children are now on immigration duty. From February through April, these agents nationwide worked the fewest hours on child exploitation that they have during that period in more than 10 years. Illicit Iranian oil: For almost a decade, a team of special agents has investigated Iran’s efforts to dodge sanctions and sell oil on the black market. But since the immigration crackdown, cases in which officials were trying to seize tankers loaded with Iranian oil have languished, with ships and cash disappearing before they could be seized. Antiterrorism intelligence: Fewer intelligence reports are going out to local law enforcement officials about terrorism, active shooter incidents and other threats. One official said the decline in reports had been like “chipping away at everything that’s been built since Sept. 11.” Law enforcement training: To make room for the thousands of new deportation officers being hired by ICE, the federal law enforcement training academy has suspended many training programs for other agents, including at the Secret Service, the Army Criminal Investigative Division and the Diplomatic Security Service. Coast Guard missions: This summer, two surveillance planes were redeployed from Florida to the site of ICE’s busiest detention center, in Louisiana, and search-and-rescue planes from Alaska and North Carolina were put “on call,” according to documents reviewed by my colleagues. The redeployment poses a “high risk to mission fail” for certain Coast Guard operations, according to one of the documents. Human trafficking: Agents who normally work on more complex human smuggling and sex and labor trafficking cases have been sidetracked, according to federal officials. One former law enforcement official said that after he tried to report sex trafficking at hotels, he was informed that agents might not be able to investigate right away because of immigration duty.
NUMBER OF THE DAY 17 percentThe number of international college students enrolling in U.S. academic institutions for the first time decreased by 17 percent this fall, as the Trump administration has explicitly sought to curb the enrollment of college students from abroad.
ONE LAST THING What’s in the Earhart Files?Trying to increase transparency, the Trump administration has moved to release a large trove of files about a sometimes mysterious figure. We’re talking, of course, about Amelia Earhart. On Friday, the National Archives published more than 4,600 pages of documents about the aviator, who vanished in 1937 while trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world. Historians and others who have dug into the Earhart disappearance were underwhelmed. Many of the documents, they said, were already available to the public or uninteresting. |
