Manolo Betancur pulled his passport from his pocket on Saturday afternoon. The Colombia-born U.S. citizen is a bakery owner and community leader known throughout the city.
“Look,” he said, showing me his passport, his hand trembling. “I have to carry this with me. You never know.”
A few minutes later, a truck with U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents cruised through the parking lot at Manolo’s Central Avenue bakery, and kept going. They are here as part of “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a name that the author of the book by that title, E.B. White, most certainly wouldn’t have co-signed.
Betancur’s point: If one of Charlotte’s highest-profile documented Latino immigrants lives in fear, thousands of others do, too. He shut down his bakery on Sunday, as did most other businesses along Central Avenue in the Latino-populated corridor.
CBP Commander Gregory Bovino posted on social media that CBP arrested 81 people on the first day of operations, “many of whom have significant criminal and immigration history.” Homeland Security has said time and again that they’re only targeting the “worst of the worst.”
On the other hand, The Charlotte Observer interviewed a man from Honduras who’s been a citizen for six years, and who said agents stopped him twice in the same South Boulevard parking lot. WFAE talked to a woman in east Charlotte who was sipping coffee on her porch Saturday while landscapers put Christmas lights on a tree in her yard, only to be encountered by agents circling the tree. On this same hand still, on Monday, Myers Park Country Club told members that CBP entered the private grounds to briefly detain an employee, who was soon released because they “possessed all required and valid documentation.”
Also Monday, several agents arrived at an afterschool program for children as young as five, only to be turned away by witnesses and staff.
Some reports have been more difficult to verify. At one point Sunday, social media lit up with claims that agents were present at a hospital in the city, arresting patients. That was untrue.
Either way, Charlotte is living, at least for the next few days, in the bizarre land between truth and fiction, between the “worst of the worst” promise and the visuals of citizens being hassled to show their documents while going about otherwise ordinary lives.
The CBP surge was expected to last at least five days. Monday morning brought a new dynamic, with kids and parents going to school. CMS sent a memo to families Sunday night saying there has been “no immigration enforcement activity on CMS property,” and they’re not aware of any plans for such activity. Still, more than 20,000 students in the system (about 15 percent) missed school Monday, according to WSOC.
“The immigrant community is upside-down,” Sheriff Garry McFadden told me Sunday afternoon. “Fear and being scared are two different things. Anxiety from being scared doesn’t last. These communities have been living in fear since the very first arrest. You know how your heart beats when an officer comes to your door? Imagine living through that for 48 hours.”
During my 90 minutes or so talking to people at Manolo’s on Saturday, dozens of people filed in to buy his baked goods. Most of them were white. One older man with an American flag on his ballcap opened the door and said, “Are you the owner?” When Betancur nodded, the man said, “I’m with you.” Others just sat in chairs by the door, believing that non-Hispanic faces would deter agents.
Council member-elect J.D. Mazuera Arias, a naturalized citizen who was a DACA recipient as a kid, contemplated starting a fund to help ease the financial burden for businesses that elected to close during the CBP operations. He questioned whether corporate leaders would lean in and help, or whether they’d stay quiet for fear of retribution from the administration.
That doubt was symbolic of a breathless, confusing, disjointed weekend. Five miles away at the same time Saturday, a crowd gathered in uptown to protest the CBP’s presence in the city. Down Central Avenue, Tacos El Nevado locked its doors and had staff members standing in a parking lot to greet customers and let them in.
Meanwhile, a few hours earlier, 11,000 people participated in the Charlotte Marathon, with bands and cowbells lining The Plaza — just two miles away from Manolo’s Bakery.
“On one side of the city you have people raking leaves and watching marathons, and on the other side you have people raking glass from their windows, and somewhere else you have people saying, ‘Good,’” McFadden, the sheriff, told me.
“We live in three different worlds.”
Editor’s note: We updated this story with new details on Monday, November 17.