Inside Charlotte’s Immigration Crackdown

Charlotte's Web and the new immigration crackdown. Federal agents have flooded Charlotte, North Carolina, launching a surprise immigration sweep over the objections of local leaders. According to ABC News and the New York Times, Mass border patrol teams led by senior official Gregory Bovino fanned out across immigrant neighborhoods, parking lots and even Home Depot stores, arresting people and detaining others on the spot. They called it Charlotte's Web. DHS says it is surging law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed, blaming sanctuary politicians for being soft on crime. But Democratic Governor Josh Stein and Charlotte Mayor Vi? L says the raids are causing unnecessary fear and uncertainty, urging residents to focus on violent criminals, not everyday worker. We hear that fear in human terms. A naturalized citizen says agents smashed his truck window and cuffed. And a homeowner watched her undocumented landscaper abandon his ladders and flee, then go back to work because he still had to feed his family. Okay, so what's the real message here with the federal government raiding Charlotte, this administration is sending a mess. Hey, if you live in a democratically run state and you have a Democratic mayor and you have some congressional districts that are sometimes close that vote Democrat, be very careful. We're going to come and scare you come election day next year. So maybe you should just stay home. And if that helps Republicans win more congressional races, them's the brakes. That's really what this is about. Okay, let's dig a little deeper. Now. This is a story near and dear to my heart because I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, lived there from the time that I was five years until I went off to college. It was still my official residence Till I was 22 years old. I have family there. I'm going back for Thanksgiving in just a week and a half. It's a different type of a place. Charlotte, the whole Charlotte metropolitan area is about a million or so people. It's not a small town. And yet it kind of feels like a small town. It still has a city manager style government town. My knowledge and things are just not that partisan there. There's a lot of harmony in Charlotte and there have been a tremendous number of immigrants coming to that city for a long, long time. My own family sponsored a refugee family from Vietnam way back in 1980. And they're still there and they're still thriving and they're entrepreneurs and they've run businesses and they pay taxes and they are very much a part of the fabric of Charlotte, North Carolina. And it was good for my family. It was good for their family. It was good for Charlotte. And this is a story that is told again and again and again throughout Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte's kind of a different place. They had one of the first cases where a federal judge imposed busing for inter to break up racist school patterns. Interracial busing. And I in fact was, was bused across school in fifth grade, in sixth grade. And I won't kid you, it was a little bit rocky the first few years, especially the high schools. There were some riots. This is where early 70s. But it came to be seen by city leaders across the political spectrum as something that was actually unifying. And when Ronald Reagan came in 1984 campaigning for reelection, he had as a part of his stump speech and I'm going to end interracial busing. And that got a lot of applause in other cities throughout the South. It didn't get any applause in Charlotte, North Carolina. I remember it and remember it clearly because Charlotte, I'm not going to say it's this huge. I'm not going to say it's Boston or Madison, Wisconsin, but it is comparatively a much more liberal, open minded place than a lot of cities in the South. And you can be a centrist, a moderate, you can even be a Democrat and get elected to office, as has happened with their mayor and happened with our governor. Now the governor, Josh Stein, 1, he won bigly this past election in part because the Republican who ran against him was seen as such an utter buffoon. This was the Lieutenant governor who was on all sorts of, I guess, porn sites and talked about his love for, I guess, transsexual porn sites. He was just by all accounts a crazy guy. Whereas the Democratic governor, Josh Stein was seen as a sane, sensible centrist as well as. And that's not going over very well in Washington. They don't like it when a sane, sensible centrist gets elected to govern a state. So that's why they're sending this message. I can tell you I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but I can tell you I know that the crime rate in Charlotte, North Carolina is significantly lower than what it is really just a few miles from me down south in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But you're not going to see, you're not going to see federal authorities coming in to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Well, why not? Isn't crime crime? No, crime doesn't really count if you have a Republican governor in your state. Crime doesn't really count if your state already sends a lot more Republican representatives to Washington than Democratic representatives. So that is exactly what we're seeing here. The other thing that's important to realize about Charlotte is Charlotte's economy has consistently done better than the national economy for easily the last 60 years. I remember moving there in the 1960s, and I was a young boy, and it just didn't matter when the rest of the country was in a recession. Charlotte did fine, or it certainly did better than other places. It is a place that's all about business. It's just not that it's not a political as, say, New York City or Chicago. People are there to make money. It's been a huge banking hub, and it's been a place that has attracted immigrants from around the world who have done extremely well, and it's helped the entire city. That's why so many people like Charlotte. And if you've never been there, you may want to spend some time. I've never once heard anybody who moved from. Whether it was in south Florida, which they do, they get fed up here or New York or other places, moved to Charlotte and. And say, wow, it sure was a lot better at these other. Never heard. Of.