More than 250 people have been arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina, in another major operation by President Donald Trump’s administration to target illegal immigration to the United States. The arrests were made by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which handles border control, among other things.
Not much is known about the people arrested: according to agents, the people arrested were part of criminal gangs (“some of the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens,” a DHS spokesperson said. BBC; The department added that some of those arrested had previous convictions for crimes such as assault on public officials, driving under the influence of alcohol, theft and falsifying documents.
According to the governor of North Carolina, Democrat Josh Stein, people were arrested and targeted because they were not white, and therefore based on racial discrimination. “We see masked and heavily armed officers in paramilitary garb driving unmarked cars, targeting Americans based on the color of their skin, racially profiling and stopping people randomly in parking lots – that doesn’t make us safer,” Stein said.
The staff of the anti-immigration agencies that are part of the DHS (the most famous of which is ICE) can actually rely on very vague criteria to arrest suspected illegal immigrants: that a person looks foreign enough, that he speaks another language or with a foreign accent (e.g. Spanish), that he has been in certain places frequented by immigrant people (such as places where laborers congregate before being taken to the place where they work) or that he has worked a certain job.
The Trump administration called the operation in Charlotte “Operation Charlotte’s Web” (a reference to the famous children’s novel “Charlotte’s Web”): in addition to local politicians, about a hundred people living in the city protested the arrests.
Charlotte is the latest Democrat-governed city where Trump intervened in an operation of this kind, justifying the action with security needs: this happened in Chicago, where Trump also sent the National Guard (reservists), and in Los Angeles, where there were large protests and the army was also sent.
The operation is part of Trump’s broader effort to expand his power. Chicago is one of the so-called “sanctuary cities” (sanctuary cities), namely US cities that have passed laws making it difficult for federal authorities to track and expel migrants. Even in those cases, DHS has justified the federal government’s intervention by saying that the operations were aimed at several illegal immigrants accused in various ways of being part of criminal gangs, drug trafficking and other crimes.
– Read also: The Trump administration’s largest operation against illegal immigration
