- Just ahead on Black Issues Forum, from families fearful of dropping children off at school to store owners closing up shop and workers staying home, the ripple effects of immigration enforcement in North Carolina are being felt by many.

We discuss what increased ICE presence means for black and brown communities, the rights of immigrants and citizens in this climate, and how many are supporting their neighbors and advocating for change.

Coming up next, stay with us.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Welcome to Black Issues Forum, I'm Kenia Thompson.

This week, North Carolina made national news when federal customs and border protection agents increased operations in Charlotte and later expanded to Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and surrounding areas.

Many across the state have reported experiencing or witnessing racial profiling and aggressive enforcement tactics.

Local organizers say these recent operations are creating fear, confusion, and instability, but they also stress that communities are not powerless.

To share what power and rights people have when under these circumstances, I welcome our guests.

First up is Veronica Aguilar, Communications Director with El Pueblo.

And then we've got Bettina Umstead right here to my left, Durham Public Schools Board of Education Chair, and our friend, political analyst, Steve Rao.

Welcome to the show, everyone.

Thank you so much for being here.

It's unfortunate we got to gather at this kind of conversation, but Veronica, I want to start with you.

You recently released a press release issuing a powerful statement condemning what you're calling a campaign of terror targeting our communities.

Share with us what your community has been going through this past week.

- Yeah, this past week has been a lot of fear for our community.

It has meant workers not showing up to work.

It's meant students not showing up to school, families being held in their homes, scared to even step foot outside for fear of these federal immigration agents that have shown up in our state.

It has created a lot of chaos.

We've seen from videos from Charlotte just this past weekend, how these federal immigration agents showed up and immediately started racially profiling our community, targeting anyone who looked Latino, who looked like an immigrant, without even stopping to question at all.

And their tactics have been incredibly brutal and I think unpredictable.

They've shown up at schools when parents pick up their children.

They've shown up at churches, at work sites.

It's meant a lot of fear and harm for our community.

We've also seen how that same community and allies have shown up in solidarity.

They've really shown up to show that immigrants are not alone.

Our immigrant community has allies.

We have strength and power.

And that North Carolina will not stand by and watch as these federal immigration agents cause chaos in our state.

- I see the energy shift when you talk about the allies and that's beautiful.

That gives me chills.

Bettina, Charlotte reported over 30,000 students, I think, that did not show up to school.

What have we seen here in Durham?

- Yeah, Durham Public Schools had about 6,500 students that did not show up to school on Tuesday.

And we've seen low attendance through the rest of the week.

Our total student body population is around 31,000 scholars.

On average, we would typically have about 11% of students absent.

So we've seen almost double that this week.

We have also seen our students in our community rally in the midst of the fear.

And I also wanna highlight our educators who are also navigating the scary world as well.

Many of our students staged protests this week.

Many of our students have been gathering with others to figure out how to deliver food.

Our community is showing up, welcoming students with signs and other smiling faces.

So it's really been a scary time for our schools and our Durham community.

But we've also, again, seen our community show up.

- Yeah, and I think that's the beautiful part about unfortunate situations like this is you do see communities show up and that restores humanity to a certain level.

But we see people showing up, but then we also know people voted for this.

Steve, let's ask you this question.

Is this what the people want?

Trump has said that we haven't gone far enough, right?

But his campaign stood on a promise to make America safe, undocumented immigrants, and control the border.

So is this what's happening because this is what people have voted for?

- Well, unfortunately, elections have consequences, and so we shouldn't be surprised.

This is what President Trump said he was gonna do.

But this is not what people want.

I mean, elected officials, community leaders, business people, all of us, we wanna be safe.

But there's a difference between safety and fear.

And right now, we have a federal immigration policy that is not community-based.

We already have Wake County Sheriff, sheriffs across the county, police chiefs that are doing their job already to work with federal agencies to keep us safe.

But what this immigration policy does is when you have people coming with masks, you have tinted windows, people get scared.

They go into panic, and then they don't go to school, they don't go to work, it hurts the economy, businesses shut down.

- The fear is not good.

- Yeah, agriculture, retail.

So I've always said that the best way to have immigration reform is to have a bill in the Congress where you accelerate the path of legal citizenship and then address border.

But doing this is just creating fear and panic, and that creates chaos in our communities.

So I don't think this is what the people of America want.

- People who voted.

- Yeah, we're better than this.

My favorite musical, Alexander Hamilton, immigrants get the job done.

They do, and we need to recruit people from this country, and if they're not here legally, we have to figure out a way how to assimilate them into our society.

But doing this, it sends a bad message to the world, and so we just have to pull together as a community and help each other through this.

- Yeah, Veronica, share the mission of El Pueblo, and we'll just start there, and then I'll add some more to that.

- Yeah, so El Pueblo's a non-profit based in Raleigh, and we advocate for the Latino community, for immigrant communities.

We have leadership programs, civic education programs, and we also provide direct services.

Cultural celebration is also a really important part of our mission, and so all of that is to the end of supporting and uplifting our immigrant communities.

- Nice, and the things that we see immigrants dealing with today, what should and should not be part of any strategy of making the country safe or reforming immigration?

- I think part of what is not part of the strategy is racial profiling that we've seen by federal immigration agents.

It's creating fear.

It's families who are afraid to even go out for groceries and who have been at home for days, maybe living off of just like a one week grocery haul.

I think that cannot be part of a strategy.

I think it cannot be part of a strategy to target so-called, to have a campaign targeting criminals, as they have said, when that is not what is happening.

What we're seeing is racial profiling on a scale that is inhumane and brutal.

- Yeah, just to piggyback on that, I mean, even in my own Indian American community or Asian community, most are here legally, skilled immigrants, but there may be some whose paperwork has expired, but my own wife one day said, "Well, should I take my passport to work?"

And so the fear is because we're people of color, what if I'm driving back from here and someone from my stops me and I don't have my passport?

So I think there's just a lot of fear about this profiling.

And even for the people that are here doing their jobs, they're just really scared.

And then it's upsetting to the children and the schools.

And so, you know.

- Yeah, speaking of schools, how's the leadership at Durham Public Schools responding to this and helping families?

- I think since January, our families have started to express some concern around what may happen when the administration changed.

And so intentionally, our school principals, our superintendent, Dr.

Anthony Lewis and his team have been meeting with families all year and some intimate cafe conversations to talk about what their needs are from the school system.

And so when this showed up this week, people knew what to do.

So we've retrained our staff members again.

They already had some training around what to do.

If enforcement agents were to show up at their school, we have continued to outpour support to our students through our counselors and our social workers.

And then we also have principals who are just in the building taking care of folks.

So we're doing instruction, but we're also making sure that we're taking care of the students who are there and then helping organize for the students who want to protest, partnering with those community members who are bringing in resources.

So we've really seen our community step into action this week.

- I want to ask a question because one of my biggest concerns is, you know, let's say a parent was taken and a child is at school.

What happens in that?

I mean, I hear stories that children have gone home and no one's there.

What happens?

- And that's exactly an issue.

It's incredibly traumatizing to a child to show up home and their parents are gone.

It's a trauma that we've seen happen in the past, stories, you know, firsthand stories being told.

I know that we have encouraged our immigrant community, the families that we work with, to avoid that sort of situation, to prepare for the worst by working with attorneys to do what's called a power of attorney.

And this ensures that if, you know, worst case scenario, this situation did arise, someone, they have granted someone kind of legal powers to be able, so that the child is not abandoned.

And so that's what we've been encouraging.

- Putting proper measures in place, yeah, planning.

Yeah.

So I want to talk a little historically to kind of tie it in, right?

ICE has tended to disproportionately target black communities, Caribbean communities, African communities.

When we talk about racial profiling, we've brought that up a lot.

What are the parallels and the ties in this operation that we're seeing here that has historically always kind of played to our community?

Steve, I'll come with you.

- Well, we've seen this pattern before, right?

I mean, people are treated differently based on their race.

If, you know, George Floyd, that happened.

And so many stories of black Americans or other people of color just being targeted to walking in a neighborhood because people make, there's a bias.

Well, they're more, they're gonna commit a crime.

So this is a pattern that we've seen in this country and make no mistake.

I mean, I think this is really a media stunt.

It's a fear tactic for this administration to scare people to not come here and to tell the people that are here to go leave.

And we saw this happen in the 1920s when America's immigration policy tried to whiten America and they were able to do it.

And only in the 1960s, particularly after Nixon became president, you saw immigrants coming in and changing the immigration laws.

People like my parents came in.

So this is a historical precedent.

This has been tried by this country before.

This is going from the history playbooks.

President Trump knows what he's doing and he's doing it for that very reason.

- Well, let's, you know, social media, I've been enthralled with everybody posting.

And I think, you know, people say our phone is our strongest weapon that we have in our pockets and people have been documenting for sure.

But I think one of the biggest questions is, what can I do?

What can't I do?

Right?

And so I'd love for you to maybe clarify what are some misconceptions of what we can do for others and what we cannot do.

- Yeah.

Well, thankfully, there's a lot of ways to show up for the immigrant community.

Depending on your level of comfort, there's many ways.

What I encourage you to do is not to do nothing.

There's, you know, if, you know, the worst case scenario happens and you do happen to see and witness federal immigration agents detain someone or stop someone or show up to a business or restaurant, one of the most important things you can do is document.

So pulling out that phone, using your camera, utilizing your resources to film, to take photos from a safe distance, of course, for your comfort level.

Calling to verify and report these sightings.

It's also incredibly important to keep track of where these are happening, to alert community members.

We have hotlines on our social media that you can call depending on where you are throughout the state.

And, you know, apart from directly reporting and documenting, you can also support communities by joining a food distribution or being trained to be a verifier.

There's a lot of different ways to support.

- And that's all on your website too, right?

- Yes.

- I wanna pull Bettina in real quick.

As a professor, I know that we've gotten information on what we can and cannot do in the classroom.

How much information is being shared with teachers to educate them on what rights they have?

- Yeah, so we have, again, trained all of our principals, school leaders, front office staff, and educators around what to do.

The school board also passed a resolution last night affirming that guidance.

So ICE, one should not be able to enter your school building unless they go through the front door with a judicial warrant, right?

We are very clear about that.

And the same way if you were to see another person on campus that you didn't know, you would say, "Hey, call the office, get this taken care of really quickly."

So we've been really clear around that.

And we also know that staff are not allowed to ask documentation status, right?

In the United States, every child in our community has access to a public education.

So we are not asking around documentation status.

We are not allowed and would not discriminate against students based on that.

So we are a welcoming place for every single student.

- Yeah, Steve, you wanted to add something?

- Well, you know, community town hall meetings.

Yesterday evening, there was a North Carolina Asian Americans Together.

I want to thank them for putting together the program of what are your rights, what kind of paperwork, what if you get pulled over, your lawyers that can provide that.

These are the information that we can do.

And then, you know, I've been really grateful for the elected officials that have been, you know, doing things in terms of, you know, the governor issuing a statement, the mayor of Raleigh, but one of my friends, Christina Jones, she's a Raleigh council member.

She was out there calling businesses, calling me almost every, on the hour, monitoring it.

And unfortunately, they shouldn't be doing this alone.

The federal government should be working with local officials, but the reality is, there's a lot we can do above and beyond just watching the news and saying, oh God, I feel helpless.

- Another confusion, maybe it's just me, but I've also seen some posts around this, is people who show up in the different gear with the different letters, right?

So we've got ICE, we have CPB, we have, I think it was HSI and some others, CBP, excuse me, who is allowed to do what?

And are we seeing all of these folks in engaging this week?

- Yeah, what we've seen is that CBP has moved from Chicago to Charlotte and increased ICE activity in our state.

So ICE and CBP work together to, in this campaign of raids and detentions and arrests, what I am calling them all is kind of federal immigration agents, because they are all from the federal government, they have a federal directive to enforce this campaign, and it's targeted towards the American community.

- I think what's been really scary about it as well is that even if we're like, well, you should not be able to do this or should not be able to do that, we're seeing a lot of these federal agents take full range and do all different types of things.

So I think that's really what makes it scary is that we're not sure where people are gonna go.

- Let's talk about allyship.

We've started at the top where we said communities come in together and it's a beautiful thing.

When we talk about ICE, many people assume that it's just a Latino issue.

We touched earlier that it hits all minority groups, right?

But we do know that immigrants are one of the fastest growing populations here.

How can we strengthen solidarity between black and brown communities and even though we're targeted in different ways?

- Yeah, I think even though that we're targeted in different ways, we have to come together for the same system is attacking black and brown communities.

Federal immigration agents work in a similar way to the police system.

It's all about over-policing our communities.

It's about over-detaining our communities and over-arresting our communities.

So I think coming together and realizing that this is a common issue that we have while also recognizing that I think the black community is disproportionately affected by mass incarceration, by over-policing is a way that we can come together.

- Many African American folks say, "This isn't my fight," 'cause they're not immigrants, but.

- There's strength in the coalition building, right?

While we believe that our liberation is bound with each other, then we can see us truly work together to create the world that we wanna see for each other.

- I see this truly in our students.

Our schools, our majority students of color across racial spectrum, and when some of their peers didn't show up this week, students said, "Wait a minute, what's going on?

"I care about my other students who are in our community, "and so we gotta stand up for that."

I think it's the beauty of what a community is when people from all walks of life come together to think about how do we create a better community for ourselves.

- We all have a shared story.

I mean, we're a nation of immigrants, and immigrants, I'm the son of immigrants, and you're an immigrant.

We've all left something we love to come to pursue a better life.

We're working hard, we're paying the taxes, and so I think the key is building these coalitions, which I've always been an advocate of, between Asians, South Asians, Black Americans.

Dr.

King got inspired by Gandhi for civil disobedience, so there's a connection between India and the Black community, but we're all people of color, and so we have to pull together, and issues like this do bring us together.

So I'm seeing that happen today, which gives me some hope.

It's hard to look at the glass half full, but you know, trying to-- - Have you heard any, I guess, news or understanding of what the collaboration with local police looks like?

'Cause that's also, I mean, we have a history of over-policing, right, in our Black and brown communities.

However, I have not seen any reports of police being involved in these activities, but I could be wrong.

- Well, first of all, local police don't get involved in immigration enforcement at all.

I mean, that's one thing people don't understand, but I will say the police chiefs that we have, for example, the Raleigh Police Chief Rico Boyce, who's a friend of mine, or Rosser from, just Chief Rosser from Morrisville, or you know, they work on community policing.

These are police departments that actually come into communities, address questions, and so they're there to answer questions, to make you safe, and to make sure that you're getting the basic services that you need, and also working with federal agencies, when appropriate, to target an incarcerated violent criminal.

So we already have a system in North Carolina that's working, so I wanna re-emphasize that to the people listening to this show, or watching this show, so that's my answer.

- And our local representative, I mean, you shared a little while ago that you had a friend who's calling and calling you every hour.

- Raleigh Council Member Christina Jones.

I just wanna give her a shout out.

I mean, she was calling people, calling businesses, even saying, "ICE is coming into Briar Creek.

"They're going into this restaurant.

"They're going into Home Depot."

And it felt bad that she took two days of her time as a Raleigh Council Member, but that helped.

She was calling me, and then I would call a business owner, so if we all do our respective parts, we can help, and so, you know.

- When we, well, I've seen reports of protests, right?

In the Raleigh area, Capitol Boulevard, the other night, protests.

I know I have a friend who's an activist.

She was protesting.

What does protesting do, though?

Does it change?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

It's showing up, it's standing out.

If nothing else, it's being in community with people who also are not standing for these federal immigration agents like invading our state, and so I think not only does it show that we are in community, that we are united, and that we will not stand for the terrorizing of our immigrant communities, but it is building bonds with our community, and showing those who are afraid to go outside of their home that they are not alone, and that is powerful to combat fear.

- Yeah, I wanna bring you in and just talk about, you know, what do parents and teachers do in this moment, needing to keep their students safe?

- Yeah, I think for a lot of our parents and families, they are making decisions every day about what to do in the best interest of their family, and I encourage you to continue to make that decision.

Our school district is ready to welcome you whenever that is the case, but I also think we've seen a lot of parents who are using the privilege that they may have to do something on behalf of their community members, of their neighbors, and I really think students have questions, and you can educate your students too.

I've heard so many conversations of parents talking to their students about what's going on, and the students are really trying to understand why would we do this, right, to our community members that we love.

So I think continuing to have that conversation, use that privilege, and show up to make sure our community knows you're here.

- And what local organizations or community partnerships do you have to help with food, for shelter, for any of those things?

- We have a lot in Durham.

We have also a lot of our local elected officials are leading efforts.

We have Durham Public Schools Strong, Durham For All, who've been organizing food efforts this week.

So if you want to, please connect with them online, and they will plug you into all of our different groups.

- That's great, that's great.

You were gonna add something, I cut you off.

- No, no, no, I just wanted, one thing, I agree with everything you said, ditto and everything.

The only thing I would add in the limited time we have is that we often don't talk about why people are coming to this country, and it's also the foreign policy of our nation.

We have, in Venezuela, for example, you have a dictator that's persecuting and torturing people, and there's a confusion between asylum and immigration, we don't have enough, asylum is for political persecution, but we've got to make sure that we make the conditions in those countries better.

So that's why they're coming to America.

They're not coming to America to break the law.

They're coming to America because they're being murdered and tortured in Venezuela, but there's not enough judges to adjudicate asylum.

So I just want to get that out there, that that's something we don't talk about enough.

- Thank you, Steve.

Veronica, if we have a viewer who's like, "I want to help," and they want to support El Pueblo, can they do that, where do they find you?

- Yeah, absolutely.

They can find us on our website, elpueblo.org.

We have social media on Instagram, Facebook.

We're even on TikTok as El Pueblo INC.

I absolutely encourage you.

There's so many ways that you can help, whether it's donating your time, training as a volunteer, or supporting other organizations that are doing this work.

- And it's a statewide organization?

- We are based in Wake County, but there are statewide organizations that are doing, like ICE verification.

San Berenice is doing a great job at doing that.

They have a hotline.

In Charlotte, there's Carolina Migrant Network.

In the western part of the state, there's SEMA.

They are doing incredible work.

So we're all joining forces to keep our state safe.

- Nice, I'll give you kind of the last thought of, what do you want viewers to walk away with today and know about your community?

- Hmm, I want people to walk away knowing that our community is here to work, it's here to live, to live a beautiful life.

And you have the power to make sure that immigrant voices are heard.

So do something, don't do nothing.

- Yeah, that is true.

- Yeah, that's the time.

- I'll let you kick that off.

I'll let you add.

- Yeah, I will add that there are policies that local elected officials can implement to strengthen the protections around immigrant families.

So thinking about another thing that you can do, contact your local school board, your local city council, your local county commissions to think about how can they enhance protections around our immigrant communities.

And then stand up, volunteer, go out, make sure your voice is heard to know that our community is safe.

- Yeah, Steve?

- We just have to support each other, neighbors, communities.

We're a nation of immigrants and I believe we're better than this as a country and we just need to come together as Americans.

We can be united in our diversity.

And I think that we're still the greatest nation and people-- - Voting does matter.

- Voting, elections have consequences, but I mean, even on the son of veterans in our US Air Force, they were immigrants from India and they served this nation so that we could all be one America.

And so we need to remember that, that we are still the united, united, not the divided states of America and elections have consequences.

- Indeed.

Steve Rao, Veronica Aguilar, and Bettina Umsted, thank you so much, all of you, for being here and having this conversation and the work's not done.

So we will sign off and go do our work.

I thank you for watching.

If you want more content like this, we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag #BlackIssuesForum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum and on the PBS video app.

I'm Kenia Thompson, I'll see you next time.

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