loading . . . Homeland Security Investigations officers search for two individuals who fled the scene after being stopped while selling flowers on the side of the road on Nov. 16, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
Alain Stephens is an investigative reporter covering gun violence, arms trafficking, and federal law enforcement.
On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.
For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.
Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.
Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.
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## **Kicking the Hornets’ Nest**
What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.
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In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.
By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.
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Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.
Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.
## **Blood in the Hills**
For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.
> Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored.
But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.
It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.
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## The War on Immigrants
To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.
“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.
Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.
That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.
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## **No Southern Comfort for Feds**
This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.
The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.
On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.
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_IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
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