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- Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte
There’s a good Guardian explainer why the Border Patrol can invade a US city that’s a hell of a long way from a border. Basically, their powers are slightly reduced there, but they have the right to be there — yet another thing to put on the list to change if we ever get out of here.
I’ve never thought of Charlotte as a “blue city” in the way that LA and Chicago are — it’s full of banks and corporate jobs. Looking at the stats, it’s pretty blue: Mecklenberg County, which is where Charlotte is, was roughly 67/33 D vs R in 2024 and 2020. Chicago (Cook County) was 70% D in 2024, and 75% D in 2020. (LA County is much larger than either Cook or Mecklenberg, and it was 65% D in 2024 and 71% D in 2020.)
But both California and Illinois are heavily D at the statewide level. This is not the case in North Carolina, where the Presidential margin was a couple of points in 2020 and 2024.
Like the other ICE deployments, this is a revenge tour:
The homeland security department, which oversees Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has said it is focusing on North Carolina because of so-called sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation between local authorities and immigration agents.
As much human misery as they caused, I don’t think the ICE presence in Chicago went well for the Trump Administration. Communities banded together and had a lot of success harassing ICE. In Charlotte, they’ve gotten a head start because the Chicago resistance served as a model to copy. Whistles are everywhere.
The kind of resistance happening in Charlotte today is going to lay the groundwork for political action tomorrow. This seems pretty obvious to me, and with the retirement of Thom Tillis, it’s a must-win for 2026. Seems like a stupid place for Trump’s ICE assholes to be waving their dicks around.
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