The granddaughter of Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White has blasted the Trump administration for naming a brutal immigration crackdown after the children’s classic.
In the 1952 book, Charlotte the spider spins words in her web to save a doomed pig. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials lifted the title for “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a Border Patrol and ICE push in Charlotte, North Carolina, that officials say targets “criminal illegal aliens who flocked to the Tar Heel State because they knew sanctuary politicians would protect them.”
Martha White, who manages her grandfather’s literary estate, drew a stark line between the raids and the values at the heart of Charlotte’s Web. In a statement shared with CNN, White said the author “certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons,” adding: “He didn’t condone fearmongering.”
White, who has edited several collections of her late grandfather’s essays on democracy and freedom, said he “believed in the rule of law and due process,” arguing that borrowing his work to sell a mass roundup betrayed that legacy.
It is not the first time someone tied to the naming of a Trump-era immigration operation has taking umbrage at DHS. Last month, the mother of Illinois student Katie Abraham told how she was horrified that Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz” was branded in her slain daughter’s name.
In North Carolina, DHS says 81 people were arrested in about five hours on Saturday as the Charlotte phase of the nationwide crackdown got underway.
On Sunday, Gregory Bovino, 55, the North Carolina–born Border Patrol commander fronting “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” referenced a link to the book.
“Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please,” he wrote in an X post, quoting the passage where Charlotte’s babies float away on the wind.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, 59, has accused “masked, heavily armed agents in paramilitary clothing driving unmarked cars” of targeting American citizens “based on their skin color,” racially profiling people and “picking up random people in parking lots, and off of our sidewalks.”
The sweep has already shuttered parts of everyday life. Manuel “Manolo” Betancur, 48, closed Manolo’s Bakery in east Charlotte for the first time in its 28-year history after seeing men in green uniforms chase and tackle people outside his shop. “I need to protect my customers. I need to protect my people. I need to protect myself and my family,” he told CNN.
White said the saga shows why authors’ work should not be used as a political prop. She highlighted one of Charlotte’s lines to Wilbur the pig—“By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a little. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that”—as the kind of generosity she believes is being inverted by the operation.
The fight over Charlotte’s Web mirrors the storm around DHS’s “Midway Blitz” in Illinois, launched this year supposedly in honor of 20-year-old student Katie Abraham, who was killed in a 2025 drunk-driving hit-and-run in the state by a man in the U.S. illegally.
Abraham’s mother, Denise Lorence wrote in the Chicago Tribune that tying her daughter’s name to a “politically charged and controversial operation” rather than the “positivity and light she contributed” was “simply unbearable.”
In an interview and op-ed, Lorence said her daughter “did not choose to be thrust into this political spotlight to advance an operation she knew nothing about,” and declared: “I am reclaiming her legacy.” Katie’s father, Joe Abraham, publicly backed DHS, saying “sanctuary policies helped kill Katie” and that he gave permission for her name to be used.
E.B. White, who was born in 1899 and came of age during the rise of European fascism, wrote frequently and forcefully against authoritarianism in his essays for The New Yorker and in later collections. He died in 1985.
He warned that democratic institutions were fragile and that fear-driven politics could erode public morality as surely as any foreign threat. White’s work repeatedly championed decency, inclusion, and the dignity of ordinary people.
Martha White said she spoke out to “expose the lies or misperceptions” of the government, adding that “the rule of law still applies in Sanctuary Cities.”
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.
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