Federal immigration officials arrested 50,000 people on immigration charges in July, the highest total so far of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. And as those deportation efforts ramp up nationwide, immigration policy is in the spotlight in North Carolina’s race for an open seat in the U.S. Senate.
About 1 million immigrants are estimated to live in North Carolina, including 440,000 naturalized U.S. citizens, according to federal Census data. Data is less clear on the other several hundred thousand non-citizen immigrants, but some estimates predict that they’re split about half-and-half between those who are here legally or not.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper hasn’t gone as far as other Democrats around the country in calling for the abolition of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. But he has said immigration agents need to face more accountability. Since Trump retook office last year, dozens of people have died either in shootings by immigration agents, or while in custody at immigrant detention centers. Some of the dead were Americans.
“They are killing and detaining American citizens, including people with no criminal records and it must stop,” Cooper wrote in a recent social media post.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley, who is endorsed by Trump, wants to keep forging ahead with the president’s more aggressive immigration crackdown.
He and his campaign — in speeches, official policy platforms and responses to WRAL’s questions — have said that if elected to the Senate, he’d vote for whatever Trump wants on immigration, as well as whatever is needed after Trump is no longer in office to continue his same approach.
“President Trump ran on securing our borders … and it’s tremendously important for us to reflect on that and look at where we are today versus where we are during Joe Biden’s tenure,” Whatley said Friday.
At a roundtable event put on by his campaign, Whatley was flanked by women who had lost family members to crimes committed by immigrants — or to opioid overdoses, which Whatley blamed on immigrants.
Whatley isn’t the first Republican politician to blame immigrants for the opioid epidemic, although the data doesn’t necessarily back it up. Most illicit fentanyl is made in Mexico, but it’s typically smuggled into the U.S. by American citizens, according to government data and policy analysts. And they typically bring it in through legal ports of entry, not by sneaking over the border. About 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl between 2019 and 2023 were U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Whatley has suggested Cooper is too aligned with national Democrats on issues of drugs and the border. Cooper has pointed to his record as attorney general to show that he’s tough on drug trafficking and willing to deport violent criminals.
After Cooper became governor, Trump appointed him to help lead a task force on fighting the opioid epidemic. Among the other task force leaders was Pam Bondi, who Trump would later put in the charge of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Whatley also suggested there needs to be more money spent on immigration enforcement, while speaking Friday with Paul Perez, the president of a national union of Border Patrol agents that has endorsed Whatley. “I am going to support you,” Whatley told Perez. “I’m going to fight for you. And I’m going to make sure that we have the laws in place. And you have the funding in place.”
Trump pledged to deport millions of immigrants as part of his 2024 presidential campaign. But so far — and despite an extra $170 billion Republicans in Congress gave him last year to hire more immigration agents and implement other border security measures — his Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents have made 610,000 arrests, according to reporting this month by the Marshall Project.
It’s unclear how many of those have been deported; there have been frequent reports of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens being wrongfully arrested in immigration raids — including a Raleigh native who is fighting the government for damages over his detention last year in an ICE raid, which he blames on racial profiling.
Many of the people who have been arrested by ICE have no criminal record, and critics of Trump’s push have said it focuses too heavily on targeting people who have lived peacefully and constructively in the U.S. for years, working despite their lack of legal status. Some critics have questioned Trump’s strategy, including raids on job sites, suggesting his administration should take a more targeted approach to root out criminals.
Cooper recently wrote on social media: “Border Patrol and ICE should do their jobs to make sure our borders are secure and violent criminals here illegally are deported.”
Whatley, however, said Cooper as governor spent years fighting against ICE being able to do just that.
Three times during his eight years as governor, Cooper vetoed bills passed by the Republican-led state legislature that would’ve forced local sheriffs — who run county jails in North Carolina — to cooperate with ICE and hand over inmates suspected of immigration violations.
Cooper said the way the law was written was unconstitutional and would’ve opened up the sheriffs to lawsuits, while also making them take on federal duties rather than focusing on their main jobs. Whatley, however, said that resulted in immigrants being arrested on charges, but then being allowed to bond out, and sometimes fleeing the country.
“Elections have consequences,” Whatley said Friday. “And I think in this election there is no area where you will see bigger consequences than what is going to happen in terms of illegal immigration.”
One of the Whatley supporters who spoke at Friday’s event was Chris Storie, who was injured in 2011 on vacation with family in the Outer Banks when an undocumented immigrant from Honduras crashed into her car. Her brother died in the crash. The man was let out on bail while awaiting trial on drunk driving charges, she said, and fled the country.
WRAL previously interviewed Storie in 2023, about one of the bills Cooper vetoed that would’ve made sheriffs cooperate with ICE.
“I wanted to see him in a courtroom,” Storie said Friday. “I wanted to see him face justice. … I never got the chance to tell him — I don’t think he would have cared — but it would make me feel better to let him know what he did to my family.”
As governor in 2024, Cooper supported legislation in the U.S. Senate that would’ve amped up funding for border security, created new pathways to legal status for people already in the country, and speed up the process for asylum claims for people arriving at the border requesting entry while also increasing the standards required of them to receive it.
The bill was framed as a bipartisan immigration reform package that had priorities for Republicans and Democrats alike. But Trump was running for president at the time, and he had been making Biden’s lack of action on immigration a key part of his campaign, so he pressured Republicans in Congress not to pass it.
Whatley was chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time and also pressed GOP officials to oppose the plan, which Cooper’s campaign noted in a statement to WRAL Friday: “Roy Cooper believes our country must have a secure border and was a strong supporter of the toughest border security bill in decades that Michael Whatley opposed and helped torpedo,” a Cooper campaign spokesman said.
Whatley declined to take questions from the media after his event Friday. His campaign spokesman later wrote to WRAL: “Roy Cooper endorsed Joe Biden’s open-border policies and Michael Whatley endorses Trump’s secure borders policies. Michael will make it a priority to promote legislation that keeps our borders secure, even if another radical open-borders President were to be elected so that illegal aliens and dangerous illicit drugs don’t run rampant across our borders.”