Tangled Up in Charlotte’s Web: Immigration Court in the Wake of ICE Raids
About the Author: Kristin Nagy is a senior studying Anthropology at Princeton University, who was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is a student court observer with the Justice in View project.
Abstract: Scenes from the Charlotte immigration courthouse show us the eerie, horrifying silences left in the wake of ICE terrorism–and what anthropologists can learn from the silences we miss in our own communities
Keywords: Charlotte; ICE raids; students; home
Citation
Nagy, Kristina. 2026. “Tangled Up in Charlotte’s Web: Immigration Court in the Wake of ICE Raids.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34113363
In November 2025, during the fall of my junior year at Princeton University, I heard about “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a surge of ICE operations in Charlotte, North Carolina, which ended with the arrest of over 1,100 people.
Since moving to New Jersey from North Carolina for college in 2023, I have always felt a nagging guilt that I abandoned the community that raised me. Something quiet is always tugging my heart back. When I started seeing videos of car windows being shattered by ICE agents and hearing statistics of record absence rates as parents withheld their children in anticipation of raids, the guilt morphed into a choking fear. The few other students from North Carolina and I gave each other knowing looks and shared awkward laughs, unsure how to sit with the news from afar.
The situation is at once mine and not mine. Perhaps I have no right to be terrified when my family’s feet have always been tied to the ground by papers we never needed to ask for, when home has never been a place to flee. But that didn’t make the anxiety in my chest settle. It hasn’t settled yet, because on some nights, all the way in New Jersey, I can still close my eyes and see the video of an angry ICE agent driving across the South Carolina border, telling a group of organizers that he’s not actually leaving.
A month later, at the end of December, I take the Piedmont Amtrak to Charlotte for three days of court observation. The Charlotte Immigration Court lies on the fourth floor of a drab building tucked among trees and parking lots. The third floor is an office for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the chief counsel of ICE. The second floor is a state probation office. The first floor has two immigration law firms and a restaurant that serves sandwiches, smoothies, and lunch combos.
When I get past the security screening and walk into the courtroom, November’s violence on the streets is the elephant in the room. The memories, barely a month old, are hanging over every proceeding, even if they are never mentioned. On my first morning in court, I walk in, and the clerk, upset and suspicious, asks, “Who are you with?” multiple times in an accusatory tone. He only settles down once I tell him I’m a university student. He believed I was an ICE agent. It saddens me that anyone could mistake me for one, but these days, an ICE agent could be anyone.
Later on, as respondents and their loved ones arrive, he tries to ease the fears of the respondents by telling them in Spanish, “we are not ICE. We are a completely separate federal agency.”
After lunch on my second day, I am early in the courtroom; it’s just me and a different clerk. We start talking about a hearing from the morning where a two-year-old girl’s case was separated from her parents’ case due to a clerical error, but her parents already had an order of removal. “She should have been deported with her mom. But now that DHS was flagged of this order, they’re gonna look her up, and her parents are gonna get deported. And with ICE picking people up, the population in court is just nil.”
She tells me she’d seen federal agents in the audience of hearings, and that the latest word swirling around to explain why people’s days in court were cancelled is an “alternative form of removal.”
Through my time in the Charlotte court, at the end of every docket of Master Calendar hearings – when only I, the judge, the clerk, and the DHS attorney remain – the judge rattles off anywhere from 5 to 30 case numbers, accompanied by their country of origin but not their name. In a very bored voice, the judge announces that none of these respondents have appeared in court today and are therefore ordered removed in absentia. I am saddened by the eerie, dull quiet in the courtroom, how much of a non-event it is that my neighbors would rather hide in fear than risk encountering ICE in the courtroom. The “in absentia” list will be sent to DHS, putting the people behind those case numbers at imminent risk of immediate deportation. But all of Charlotte had just learned that your status won’t protect you from lawless violence. The masked agents who marched city streets and brandished assault weapons weren’t checking people’s court dates before stealing them from their families. When the shadow of ICE lurks at every corner, why would somebody go to the floor above their offices?
After court on my first day, two women approach me in the lobby and ask me if I speak Spanish. I nod, smiling warmly, wanting to convey that they can trust me. Nervously gesturing to herself and her friend, one of the women begins, “You can see that we are Latinas, and we have a lot of fear about what is happening. Did you see anything today?” She doesn’t need to clarify what she means. After clarifying that I’m not a lawyer or a judge, I tell them I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. They ask again, “Everyone came and went ok? Nada de ICE?”
“No, nothing today,” I respond, trying to give a sympathetic smile. “But I don’t know, it changes every day. I’m just not sure.”
On my last day, I eat lunch among parole officers, court security guards, and families with their immigration lawyers. This restaurant sticks out to me amidst the offices, a spitting attempt at a human thing in a system meant to dehumanize. There are only a few days until I fly back to Princeton, leaving behind the place that raised me. I feel powerless and even guiltier for retreating to my ivory tower.
My memory takes me back to when I was seven years old, asking my teacher why North Carolina is called the Tar Heel State. In the olden days, we produced a lot of tar from pine trees, and workers would come home after long hours with clumps of black tar on their feet – the implication being that we work hard, we have grit, and we dig our heels into the land when it matters. But I feel as if I failed to dig my heels in when the place that raised me needs me most. Observing in court is crucial work, and I hope to return to the Charlotte court soon, but my experience simply reminded me that violence is always churning in my home state, perhaps out of sight but never out of mind.
In the academy, most of us belong to faraway places. We inhabit them, we study them, we study in them, we teach in them, we make our lives in them. What do we do, then, with home?
About the issue
This article is part of On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, a special issue of Semi-Structured. This collection features the work of 22 student ethnographers, who offer insights, analysis, and experiences based on hundreds of hours in immigration courtrooms across the country over the last few years. Through their work in observation projects under the direction of scholar-activists Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba, students gained critical training in ethnographic practice and a crash course in immigration law, especially in the disjunctures between law on the books and law in practice. Understanding that wider audiences would benefit from hearing and learning directly from their students, Heidbrink, Frank-Vitale, and Galemba approached Semi-Structured to steward this thoughtful, ambitious collection. We are honored to run this issue and invite readers to consider what student observers witnessed, felt, and learned in court and why ethnographic observations are important to broader publics.
Semi-Structured is the open-access journal from the Public Ethnography Lab. The journal is dedicated to showcasing ethnography as it unfolds in the world. This journal exists because we believe ethnographic work matters beyond the academy—that the insights generated through sustained engagement with communities, organizations, and institutions can and should inform decisions, shape practices, and drive meaningful change.