In just one week, the organization Carolina Migrant Network responded to more than 1,000 calls on its emergency hotline in mid-November, following the immigration operations carried out in Charlotte.
Support network for immigrants and hotline to report arrests
Since 2019, Carolina Migrant Network has provided free legal services to people in deportation proceedings. It does so through its network of volunteer attorneys, who, in addition to offering asylum clinics, attend educational events and, in some cases, provide legal representation.
The organization is no stranger to handling emergency situations. The legal services they offer focus primarily on asylum cases, bonds for individuals in immigration detention centers, and the defense of detained immigrants.
Additionally, the organization established an emergency hotline called Comunidad Colectiva, which receives reports of immigration arrests. The group has a network of volunteer verifiers who travel to locations where agents have been reported in order to confirm or rule out their presence.
“We need the date, time, and location with as exact an address as possible and, if possible, a photo so we can send it to the volunteers and confirm whether immigration arrests are taking place or not,” said María José Espinoza, director of strategy at Carolina Migrant Network.
Verified information is shared on the organization’s social media platforms and in its WhatsApp group, which has nearly 19,000 followers.
More than 1,000 calls in one week
During the first half of 2025, the emergency hotline received an average of 8 calls per week. All of this changed in November, when Border Patrol (CBP) agents carried out Operation Charlotte’s Web, the largest immigration enforcement action in North Carolina’s history.
“It was a very difficult time for us. We were extremely busy with the community hotline we have. During that week, we received more than 1,000 calls reporting that people were seeing immigration agents,” Espinoza recalls, adding that reports came in from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
According to the organization, this high volume of reports and verifications related to Operation Charlotte’s Web shared a common factor: federal agents were using racial profiling to make arrests.
“What we saw, honestly, more than anything, was racial profiling. We saw that agents would simply approach someone who looked like they were Latin American and ask for documentation. If the person could not provide it at that moment, that’s when they were detained,” Espinoza said.
Searching for missing immigrants
Since January 2025, immigration agents have arrested more than 6,300 people in North Carolina, according to data from the Deportation Data Project. This figure nearly doubles the total arrests from the previous two years combined.
Six months after Operation Charlotte’s Web, there are conflicting figures regarding the total number of arrests, as there is still no official report. Estimates range from 400 to 1,300 individuals detained.
One of the challenges Carolina Migrant Network faced was locating the immigrants who had been arrested.
“Typically, what we had seen was that it took about 3 days to find someone using the ICE locator. But that wasn’t the case this time. It was taking more than a week, and there were even cases where people had no contact with their loved one until they were already in another country.”
According to attorneys, there is an increasingly used legal loophole that allows authorities to transfer immigrants from one detention center to another, causing distress for their families and complicating their legal defense.
“When immigrants are transferred from one prison to another, they have to create a new account in order to make calls. It’s intentional to wear people down, to make them not want to fight their case anymore,” said immigration attorney Marty Rosenbluth.
You can contact the Comunidad Colectiva hotline by calling 704-740-7737.
Find this article in Spanish here.
This video was produced thanks to the support of the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative (CJC)
