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The Trump administration's aggressive immigration crackdown has arrived in New Orleans and Minneapolis as federal agents continue expanding their dragnet for undocumented immigrants. This follows a recent strike in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hundreds of Border Patrol officers descended on the city November 15, arresting about 400 people in a week-long operation. The enforcement surge there appears to be over, but as NPR's Adrian Florido reports, Charlotte is still grappling with the fallout.
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ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: It's the end of the school day, and a yellow school bus pulls up outside an apartment complex in East Charlotte that is home mostly to immigrants. About 10 elementary school-aged children hop out. There are no parents to greet them as there normally would be. The kids walk and run the rest of the way home alone. It's just one way that life looks different in Charlotte in the aftermath of the Border Patrol's operation here last month.
STEPHANIE SNEED: It's like a hurricane came through.
FLORIDO: Stephanie Sneed is chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education.
SNEED: We're still not quite sure if the storms are completely over, and then we have to deal with the aftermath, which is much longer than the event itself.
FLORIDO: At the height of the operation last month, about 20% of the district's 141,000 students stayed home. Parents have started sending them back, but with precautions, Sneed says.
SNEED: They had notes pinned on their backpack that says, I am a citizen. I would never think that that's something that I would see.
FLORIDO: The economic impact is also still visible everywhere. It's visible in the shuttered Mexican food truck owned by a woman who asked that we ID her by her first initial, E, because she's undocumented. E and her family were preparing meals in the food truck when, on November 14, they saw on social media that a large Border Patrol convoy was driving towards Charlotte. They panicked.
E: (Speaking Spanish).
FLORIDO: "We closed the truck, and we said, no more," E says. They rushed home and locked themselves in. The next morning, she watched on TV as federal agents started nabbing people off the streets and raiding construction sites. Three weeks later, E still will not step outside her house. She doesn't believe the Border Patrol agents who swarmed the city are actually gone.
E: (Speaking Spanish).
FLORIDO: "They're waiting for us to go outside again," she says, "so they can hunt us like a cat hunts a mouse." Charlotte has been one of the nation's fastest-growing cities for more than two decades, in part because it became a banking center. Tom Hanchett is a Charlotte historian.
TOM HANCHETT: In the '90s, Bank of America built the tallest building on our skyline, and the story is they hired a steel-setting crew from Texas. And there were a lot of Hispanic people and a lot of Mexican natives standing up there on that steel, looking down, going, well, that's a pretty nice place. It's got a booming economy, and maybe we could, you know, try to make it here.
FLORIDO: And they did make it here. Today, about a fifth of Charlotte's population is foreign born. Many Latino immigrants here work in construction, hospitality and own small businesses. Manolo Betancur is one small business owner. He's from Colombia. He's owned a popular Latino bakery here for 28 years. I meet him on the now-empty sidewalks of Central Avenue, usually bustling with foot traffic.
MANOLO BETANCUR: This avenue is always packed all the time, all the time - you know, go to the laundry, go to the grocery stores, come to the restaurants.
FLORIDO: On the morning the Border Patrol arrived, he was walking to his bakery with his U.S. passport in his pocket when an SUV stopped half a block ahead of him. What he saw is seared in his mind. Agents jumped out, tackled three men who looked Latino, zip-tied their wrists and hauled them away.
BETANCUR: And I just turn around and I saw a lot of people that were coming this way.
FLORIDO: Like walking this way - families.
BETANCUR: Yeah, walking this way - families. So I just turned down. I told them, they're here, they're here and just go back to your house, go back to your house, and everybody started running.
FLORIDO: He called his employees and told them to lock the bakery doors. Later that day, he announced online that he was closing Manolo's Bakery.
BETANCUR: I don't want for people to tell their kids, I'm going to go to a bakery to get your birthday cake, and then that kid never going to get her father back or her mother back.
FLORIDO: Casey Crimmins runs Project 658, which provides services to immigrants in Charlotte, including medical care. When he saw Manolo Betancur on the news saying he was closing shop, his heart dropped.
CASEY CRIMMINS: When it's in Chicago, when it's in LA, there's scrollable shorts. When it's Manolo, who I literally had just seen four days before, saying to a camera, I've never seen anything like this before, I have to shut down my shop, it just hits different.
FLORIDO: He and others in the community sprung into action, alerting people about raids, helping kids get to school, delivering food to immigrant's homes. Crimmins says residents want to show that this is still a welcoming city, a reputation forged on hard-earned trust.
CRIMMINS: This brought a sense that all of that that was built up over decades got flushed down the toilet.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Diabetes meds?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
FLORIDO: Two employees of a medical clinic his group overseas, Lindsey Voelker and Mary Beth Stanford Picker, are out delivering medicine and food to an undocumented patient.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Spanish).
FLORIDO: The patient is an older woman from Honduras. She requested that we use only her first initial, R. The week Border Patrol was in town, she says, agents roaming her apartment complex knocked on her door two different times.
R: (Speaking Spanish).
FLORIDO: She recognized their beige uniforms through the peep hole. She stayed quiet, and they left. But she is still struggling to sleep. R cares for children while their parents are at work. Her income plummeted when people stopped bringing their kids. Today, she's only caring for two kids. She walks them to school, but she stopped using the sidewalk and started walking through the woods.
R: (Speaking Spanish).
FLORIDO: She cut a path through the brush with a machete. "They won't find me in there," she says, with a nervous laughter. Daniela Andrade is with the Carolina Migrant Network, an advocacy group. She says Charlotte won't be back to normal until people feel safe again.
DANIELA ANDRADE: Because it's very hard to say, oh, they're gone, and let's go back to normal life. It's really hard to, right now in these moments of crisis and fear in our community, to tell folks to trust.
FLORIDO: Instead, she and other advocates have been telling people not to let their guards down.
Adrian Florido, NPR News, Charlotte, North Carolina. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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