CHARLOTTE — The gourmet pasta shop surrounded by million-dollar Colonials might not be the most obvious spot for clues about how hundreds of U.S. Border Patrol officers have swept across this city in recent days.
Pasta & Provisions, a longtime local favorite in the Myers Park neighborhood, is more popular among well-to-do bankers who populate the city’s soaring financial office buildings than with the working-class immigrants who flocked here to help build that skyline. There is little Spanish spoken outside the shop’s kitchen.
But as armed federal agents in unmarked SUVs poured into North Carolina’s largest city, the store was not immune from the Trump administration’s targeted immigration enforcement operation that launched Nov. 15.
“It’s taking a toll everywhere,” said the pasta store’s owner, Tommy George, who took shifts washing dishes after one employee’s husband had been detained in the sweep. “In a way, the consequences are in every neighborhood.”
Local officials said they were told the operation has ended, although the Department of Homeland Security — which said it arrested about 370 people as of Friday — said that “Operation Charlotte’s Web” will continue indefinitely.
The effect on George’s business is emblematic of how the Border Patrol operation has rippled across the lines of race and class that have long divided this city, spilling into tony neighborhoods where many residents gave little thought to how President Donald Trump’s deportation push would affect them.
While the enforcement operation — like similar ones in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington and Chicago — has had its most visible impact on the city’s immigrant corridors, it has offered a broader glimpse of what life might be like across Charlotte without the booming immigrant communities whose members have gone into virtual hiding, including skipping work and school.
As authorities have searched for them, federal officers have raided a local country club, stopped by at least two hospitals and been spotted on highways and roads across Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte.
Salma Villarreal, who helps run ourBRIDGE for Kids, an after-school program for refugee and immigrant children, said nearly all of the families, including those here legally, opted to skip work or school to avoid risking an interaction with Border Patrol.
“They’re too scared to leave their homes,” Villareal said. “They’re too scared to trust anybody right now.”
Her nonprofit has transformed into a makeshift food-distribution site, with offices covered in bags of rice and boxes of onions sorted to give each household ingredients based on their country of origin.
The entire city is affected, Villarreal said. “Charlotte without immigrants is not Charlotte — you see it in our businesses, our culture, our restaurants.”
Pockets of the city’s Eastside, typically filled with fruit vendors and tamale stands, were noticeably empty. So were construction sites in the “wedge,” the triangle-shaped section of Charlotte with the highest concentration of White and affluent residents.
The city’s public school system reported 30,000 absencesearly last week Messaging groups for parent-teacher associations lit up with plans to station volunteers in bright-colored vests at pickup and drop-off that could make immigrant families feel more secure.
One woman told her children’s caregiver — who arrived in the United States from Mexico without authorization nearly three decades ago — to stay home as the enforcement operation began.
“It feels like a member of my family is under attack,” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the government. The woman said she brought the caretaker groceries so she could stay out of public view.
The reach of federal operations into upscale neighborhoods was exemplified by reports that Border Patrol agents had entered the Myers Park Country Club, an invitation-only, century-old institution with opulent grounds that include an 18-hole golf course and an Olympic-size pool.
Agents appeared at the building “without prior notice, warrant, or permission” and briefly detained an employee who “possessed all required and valid documentation,” the club’s interim general manager, Adam Gartside, said in a message to members viewed by The Washington Post. The club said it was exploring legal options.
An 81-year-old club member, who identified himself as “Tom,” expressed surprise that Border Patrol would enter the club, though he said he supports the immigration enforcement operation in Charlotte.
“It’s where we are in our society and our culture,” the man said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the club does not allow members to speak about its operations. “We just have to be prepared to expect anything, even here.”
A letter sent by a group of Myers Park Country Club members to Gartside requested additional accommodations for “any employee who expresses fear or discomfort about returning to work at this time” due to the immigration operations.
“It is clear that the impact is being felt widely and with great distress,” said the letter, a copy of which was shared with The Post.
Tom Hanchett, a community historian and the author of a book about the city’s nexus of race and class, said that the fallout from the federal operation has underscored the ways in which a recent influx of Latino immigrants has altered the city’s demographic and cultural makeup.
White residents had long occupied some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the “wedge” extending southeast from the city’s commercial center; Black residents had been largely confined to the crescent forming the rest of the inner ring of neighborhood sprawl.
Booming construction in the 1990s changed all that. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them undocumented, flocked to Charlotte for jobs, Hanchett said.
Today, a sign outside the Bojangles Coliseum advertises upcoming events featuring the Mexican cumbia band Los Angeles Azules and Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.
Former Mecklenburg County sheriff Jim Pendergraph — who pioneered an immigration enforcement partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and later worked for that federal agency in the George W. Bush administration — said increasing immigration and population growth have made the city more politically liberal, more congested and less safe.
“It got so bad that President Trump and others have to come in and correct the situation a little bit,” he said, adding that the need for federal enforcement has been “a tremendous embarrassment” for the city.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin suggested in a statement that the Trump administration set its target on Charlotte in response to more recent moves by local officials to cut ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“This DHS operation will target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to the Tar Heel State because they knew sanctuary politicians would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” she said.
The Charlotte metro area is smaller — and less liberal — than the other cities that have been targeted in the Trump administration’s other major enforcement operations. The city has a Democratic mayor, but Republican officials are in charge of many of the suburbs.
The Rev. Ben Boswell, a pastor whose push for racial justice put him at odds with his former congregation in the Myers Park area, said that the longer the Charlotte operation goes on, the more deeply the repercussions will cut across town and become a political flash point.
“I expect Border Patrol to be on the ballot at the midterms and at the next presidential election,” Boswell said.
George, the pasta shop owner, also said the city’s up-close view of immigration enforcement might force residents who typically tune out to instead confront the political realities of such a crackdown.
“They kicked the ‘hornet’s nest,’” he said, alluding to the nickname the city earned during the Civil War for its streak of resistance. “Maybe this will motivate the movers and shakers to wake up and see what’s happening in our country.”
Others remain resolute in their support of Trump’s effort to crack down on immigration — even if it has had unanticipated consequences.
After downsizing to a smaller house in the Charlotte suburbs earlier this year, Pendergraph said he hired a crew of four laborers to mow his lawn once a week — until one day in July, when the men, who are Latino, stopped showing up.
He said he later discovered that the workers had voluntarily returned to Mexico out of fear they might get entangled in Trump’s deportation push.
Now, the former sheriff cuts his grass himself.
Hernández reported from San Antonio.
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