“Real” America Is Turning Against #Trump’s #MassDeportation Regime

Everyday Americans in #Appalachia and the #Southeast show that resisting #ICE is becoming the rule, rather than the exception.

Alain Stephens
December 3 2025, 3:30 p.m.

"On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in #BooneNC, 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 “#OperationCharlottesWeb,” 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 #CharlotteNC 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."

Read more:
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/03/appalachia-nc-ice-protest-immigrants

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/clCyC

#ResistICE #ICESucks #USPol #TrumpSucks