North Carolina GOP Is Cracking Down on the Black Sheriffs Who Stood Up to ICE
Boosted by new supermajorities, Republicans are closing in on legislation to mandate more collaboration with ICE and preempt local policies hard-won by immigrants’ rights advocates.

Editor’s note: The GOP-run legislature passed this bill in September 2024, sending it to Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s desk. After Cooper vetoed the bill, Republican lawmakers overrode his veto in November 2024.

Piper French | June 23, 2023

In 2018, fierce organizing by immigrants’ rights groups led to a sea change in North Carolina: sheriff candidates who promised to stop collaborating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won in five of the state’s most populous counties. All were Black Democrats. Soon, the new sheriffs in Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties severed their contracts with ICE, and those in Durham, Forsyth (Winston-Salem) and Buncombe (Asheville) counties announced they would no longer detain immigrants for ICE without a judicial warrant, sparking immediate releases.

“It was very euphoric,” recalled Stefanía Arteaga, co-executive director of the Carolina Migrant Network, which was closely involved in the organizing efforts. She recalls the relief felt by some of her friends, “not having to be so fearful that a simple traffic stop could lead to a deportation.”

ICE responded with heavy retaliation. It conducted raids across North Carolina, sweeping up over 200 people in just a few days. It was “a time of total panic,” recalls Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of the immigrants’ rights group Siembra NC.

The agency also built a PR campaign to turn voters against Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden, posting billboards around Charlotte with the mugshots of immigrants who had been released on bond after the sheriff’s department rejected ICE’s requests to keep jailing them. (McFadden secured re-election anyway last year.) And it beefed up its presence elsewhere in the state, recruiting a dozen rural counties into a new form of partnership that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to identify undocumented immigrants and detain them for the agency.
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https://boltsmag.org/north-carolina-ice-and-sheriffs-bill-immigration/