Law and Orders

U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped an immigrant worker Monday in Charlotte. The man showed agents a photo of his federal employment permit, but not the actual document. So they detained him.

The two attorneys at Tedesco Legal, a Charlotte firm that specializes in immigration law, took the man’s case pro bono on a referral from a fellow attorney. Late Tuesday afternoon, from their offices in a co-working space south of the city center, Mary Lynn Tedesco and Anna Cushman were still trying to figure out where he’d been taken.

A half-hour later, Cushman’s phone rang. She excused herself and hustled out of her office.

“That was the mom of the client that I’m trying to track down,” Cushman explained when she returned about five minutes later. “I told Mom, ‘I want to know where he is. If you get any information, let me know.’

“It’s a little bit of a shell game, because [immigration officials] can move them wherever they want,” Cushman said. “That ICE Detainee Locator would be the most official way,” she noted, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is usually the agency that picks up immigrants in an inland city. “But I don’t necessarily trust things coming out of the mouths of ICE agents.”

In this case, the agency conducting sweeps is Customs and Border Protection, a different division of the Department of Homeland Security that does not follow the same protocols. Tuesday was the fourth day of what CBP has dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web” in Mecklenburg County. It also appeared to have expanded to the Triangle on Tuesday.

After less than a week in the Queen City, the “surge,” as DHS described it, had forced multiple businesses in Latino neighborhoods to close; led to a near-tripling of absences in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools; and inspired protests and demonstrations.

Tedesco and Cushman are among dozens of local immigration attorneys fielding urgent calls, emails, and texts from panicked clients and their relatives, trying to give them the best information and advice they can in an ever-changing environment. 

“You are on a long road in immigration. … But remembering it’s a long road is helpful, too, in times of crisis,” Cushman said. “We’ve been training for this since the beginning.”

DHS Claims 200+ Arrested in Charlotte

DHS said Tuesday that the Charlotte operation had detained more than 200 people since Saturday in what the department describes in a news release as an effort to “Target Criminal Illegal Aliens Terrorizing Americans.”

“I started getting emails about 8, 8:15 Saturday morning: ‘My brother was picked up. My dad was picked up,’” said Tedesco, a 36-year-old New Jersey native who opened her firm in 2020 and hired Cushman in September. “And these are existing clients.”

More followed, and she directed her paralegal to devote her time to fielding calls. The firm had about 250 clients, about a dozen of them pro bono; Tedesco and Cushman already had a full load.

By Tuesday, they were swamped. Cushman described their work as “frenetic.” Tedesco described falling asleep at about 9:15 p.m. Monday as she read a bedtime story to her 5-year-old daughter.

Cushman, 38, has twin 4-year-olds, a boy and a girl. She said she was up late Monday night and back up early Tuesday morning, toggling between posts to a Signal thread among immigration lawyers. “We’ve just got lots of moving pieces,” she said, “even on a normal day.”

Their advice varied with each client. But their basic message for anyone confronted by Border Patrol agents, Tedesco said: “If you’re documented, have your papers. Show that you are lawfully in the United States, and then say, ‘I am lawfully here in the United States. Am I free to leave?’

“If you’re not free to leave, you call us, because at that point you should be, in theory, entitled to a lawyer. If not, are there other violations of constitutional rights going on? Probably.” Undocumented immigrants, she said, should try to stay home unless it’s an emergency: “I’ve kind of told people to lay low.” 

People who need an attorney, she added, can contact Carolina Migrant Network, a Charlotte-based nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants in removal proceedings.

A few minutes later, Tedesco excused herself to catch up on “a stack of about 20 messages.”

The Cost of Confusion

Cushman is a Charlotte native whose paternal grandmother, Dr. Jonnie McLeod, founded what’s now a substance abuse treatment center network. “I love her legacy. She always saw the good in people, even in marginalized groups,” Cushman said. “So, for me, who is the group on the margins that I really want to make a difference for? It’s immigrants.”

Tedesco said she developed an interest in immigration law while in college at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She majored in Spanish, which required study of civil wars, drug violence, and American political intervention in Central America in the 1980s.

Both attorneys said they were somewhat accustomed to ICE detainers of one or two individuals. But the Border Patrol operation over the past few days has been much different.

“The tactics used by ICE to arrest and detain people are not the same as an indiscriminate, militarized group in vans and trucks going around and hitting people in public places,” Tedesco said. “It’s not the same large scale: ‘I’m gonna post up at a Home Depot parking lot and grab anyone who looks Latino.’”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment about their operations on Tuesday night.

And the attorneys still weren’t clear as of Tuesday about where people who are detained are being taken. Communication with them is limited or nonexistent. They named three ICE detention centers in Georgia and one in Louisiana where they believe DHS may be busing detainees from Charlotte, but they were still trying to confirm it.

They emphasized that even legal immigrants’ knowledge of their rights and the law is no guarantee that officers will respect them. Release without criminal charges from an ICE facility can take weeks or even months, irreparably damaging people’s lives, Cushman said: “You can’t un-ring the bell on the harm.”

Greg Lacour is a journalist in Charlotte.