This Trump-voting state is now grappling with his terror

Tuesday, Nov. 18, started out the way most other days had of late in the relatively brief life of Triangle-area resident Fernando Vazquez. Like so many children of immigrants who, despite being native-born American citizens, find themselves working alongside their parents at difficult, low-paying jobs that most of their fellow Americans are unwilling to take on — office cleaners, farmworkers, construction site helpers — 18-year-old Fernando showed up for work at a Cary construction site.

Unfortunately, it didn’t end in normal fashion.

As NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar reported, while Fernando was walking back to work after buying a drink at a nearby store, he saw a group of masked men wearing dark glasses emerge suddenly from a group of unmarked SUVs that had pulled up to the job site. Within a few moments, they had cornered Fernando behind a fenced-off HVAC area in which he had been trying to evade their attention.

“Where are you from?” one of the masked men demanded of Fernando as they handcuffed him and tossed him into one of the SUVs alongside another sobbing young worker.

Eventually, the masked men dumped Fernando — who was born in Raleigh and was carrying and displaying his North Carolina Real ID — in a parking lot a half mile or so from where they had grabbed him. They threw his wallet and ID cards out the window of the SUV as they sped off.

“I have no idea why they just dropped me off,” Fernando said later. “I kind of felt like I was being kidnapped.”

The men who carried out this terrifying assault like modern-day Klansmen or KGB thugs were, of course, by all indications, U.S. Border Patrol agents. Federal government employees. Your tax dollars at work.

This is the abysmally low place to which things have sunk in 2025 America during the second term of the nation’s autocrat-in-chief, President Donald Trump.

Across the nation — especially in jurisdictions in which politicians disfavored by Trump and his toadies have been elected to office — employees of the American government are riding into town unannounced and vigilante-like to round up people of varying immigration statuses and terrorize their communities. Almost invariably, the people in question are brown skinned.

And it’s just plain and irredeemably wrong.

Yes, it’s true that millions of people in this country are present without full legal authorization. And yes, it’s also true that a very tiny percentage of the people in this group are criminals who are preying upon others — mostly fellow immigrants.

But it’s also indisputably true that the overwhelming majority of the immigrants whose communities are subject to Trump’s terror tactics are, like the tens of millions of immigrants who preceded them (a group that included Trump’s own family), simple, salt-of-the-earth people looking for a better life.

They’ve come here to escape war, persecution and grinding poverty in their homelands and, quite often, to take on incredibly difficult and dirty jobs under conditions that few if any other Americans would find remotely acceptable.

Is the current immigration system broken? Of course it is. The need for reform that would provide millions of people with a realistic path out of the shadows and into full legal status has been overwhelming for decades. Right now, for most aspiring immigrants who lack wealth or light skin, such a path (or, at least, one that takes anything less than decades and vast sums of money) literally does not exist.

Indeed, the understanding and acceptance of this truth was so widespread as recently as early last year that Congress was on the verge of passing genuine bipartisan immigration reform/border control legislation. North Carolina’s senior Republican senator, Thom Tillis, was leader in the effort.

Tragically, however, that plan didn’t jibe with then-candidate Trump’s two-part scheme to make the demonization of immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign and to deny any kind of policy victory — even ones that were indisputably good for the nation — to the Biden-Harris administration. As a result, the plan was deep-sixed at Trump’s direction.

And so, here we are now, living in an unprecedented moment in the history of the nation that has long held itself out as the leader of the “free world.” It’s a moment in which masked employees of our government — many of them well-meaning individuals cynically misled into believing they are somehow helping to combat a “foreign invasion” — are employing terror tactics long reserved for the world’s totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

Meanwhile, millions of good and honest people — many of them American citizens like Fernando Vazquez — must now go about their daily lives in constant fear that they too will be snatched off the street and secreted off to some domestic or foreign gulag.

Nearly a quarter century ago, a previous U.S. president undertook a global campaign that he called a “war on terror.” Today, it’s a shocking and sobering fact that the millions of caring and thinking Americans pushing back against Trump’s police state actions — people peacefully witnessing, documenting, protesting and organizing and lending moral support to their immigrant neighbors — now find themselves on the front lines in just such an effort.

• Senior contributor and award-winning journalist Rob Schofield authors regular commentaries and hosts the 'News & Views' weekly radio show/podcast. A part of NC Newsline since 2006, he served as editor from 2017 to 2025 and, prior to that, worked for many years as an attorney championing the rights of low-income people and civil liberties.