Organizers Hold Vigil, Place Markers to Memorialize Victims of CBP Incursion
Signage serves as reminder to residents and symbol of support for impacted neighbors
Boxed in by 8-foot-tall wooden canvases adorned with murals on all sides, a crowd of people gathered in TAOH Outdoor Gallery on Tuesday night, some warmed by cups of hot chocolate in their hands while others tried to keep candles lit in the breezy night. Packed closely together, the crowd solemnly listened as a man read off addresses.
The list included 1607 Central Avenue … 9101 Albemarle Road … the intersection of Starmount Cove Lane and South Boulevard … Shamrock Drive and Eastway Drive … 201 Regency Executive Park Drive … and on it went.
Every time the man read off an address, he followed it with the statement, “Our neighbor was taken. We will not forget, we will not be silent,” to which the dozens of people gathered in front of him would respond, “We remember, we cry out, we shine a light.”
The group had come together to memorialize those directly impacted when, between Nov. 15-21, 2025, Customs and Border Patrol agents marauded around the city in masks, snatching up neighbors and taking them to locations that were often left undisclosed to those who cared most about them during an operation that aimed to crack down on illegal immigration.
The addresses referred to sites where these abductions were known to have happened. They’ll soon be marked with signs handed out at Tuesday night’s vigil that resemble historical markers, ensuring that residents don’t forget what happened at each respective site just two months previous.
“YOUR NEIGHBOR WAS TAKEN HERE,” each sign reads, with subtext below as with any historic marker: “Border Patrol invaded Charlotte on Nov. 15, 2025. Federal agents, wielding weapons and covering their faces, indiscriminately abducted neighbors in multiple sites across our city. In this place, we remember families separated, businesses disrupted, and our community nonviolently resisted.”
Corresponding signs have also been produced in Spanish. All of the markers will be posted across a slate of sites where CBP abductions were known to have occurred throughout the remainder of the week.
The organizing effort has been led by a number of local clergy members, including Helms Jarrell with Beloved Community Charlotte.
“There were several clergy and community members who wanted to come together to bring the community together, to be able to grieve and express our feelings about the pain and violence that we experienced when Border Patrol and ICE was in our city,” Jarrell told Queen City Nerve on Tuesday night.
“We wanted to do that in a creative way, a way that people could enter and access on multiple levels in the ways that they felt like they wanted to and were safe to do,” she continued.
The signs are meant to serve as reminders to residents of what happened in our city during that time but also as symbols of support to families who were directly impacted.
“We have come from all sorts of places on this day to bear witness to the truth that each person held in immigration detention is a life of immeasurable worth,” Jarrell told the crowd at TAOH Outdoor Gallery. “Someone with a story, a family, a place in our community, and a seat at the table that now sits empty.”
Kate Murphy is a pastor at The Grove Presbyterian Church, located in a part of east Charlotte that became a hotspot for CBP agents during their incursion in the city.
She said she wanted Tuesday’s action to be a message to her daughters, to fellow residents and to people in other cities that they don’t have to normalize the behavior of federal immigration agents.
“I think in Charlotte, we have a history of trying to make things look good even if they’re not good. This isn’t good, and we don’t want it to be,” Murphy told us. “We don’t want the disappearances to be disappeared, so we’ll have a visible marker.
“We’re pretty good at remembering terrible things that happened 100 years ago, but we need to be able to bear witness to the terrible things that are happening right now,” she continued.
Read more: With CBP Leaving Charlotte, Residents Shift Focus to Supporting Affected Communities
Local self-described artivist Rosalia Torres-Weiner was also at Tuesday night’s vigil, putting the finishing touches on a painting done in the style of Grant Wood’s famed 1930 piece titled American Gothic.
Rather than depicting two white, Midwestern farmers as the old artwork does, Torres-Weiner’s painting portrays a couple of Latinx workers standing in front of a storefront stylized as Home Depot but reading, “The Deported Home.”
Home Depot has been criticized by immigration advocates across the country for being complicit with and even empowering federal immigration authorities’ heavy-handed tactics by allowing them to target immigrants in their stores’ parking lots.
More than 100 people protested outside The Home Depot on Wendover Road on Nov. 19, while CBP was still in Charlotte, calling on the company to stop allowing agents onto its properties to carry out operations.
Read more: Protesters Call Out Home Depot, Hendrick for Empowering CBP Crackdown
Torres-Weiner said that, despite her US residency, she stayed inside for much of the time that CBP was in Charlotte for fear that she would be targeted due to her skin color and accent.
“I stayed with my friends. I was hiding, but I’m out now,” said Torres-Weiner. “I’m out with a body camera and with my passport in my pocket. But this is how I feel, if I’m an American citizen, can you imagine how my friends, my people, feel when they’re hiding?”
Torres-Weiner’s Red Calaca Mobile Studio was parked at the vigil, allowing attendees to check out some of her work and watch her short film, The Magic Kite Movie, about a family struggling to adjust following the deportation of its patriarch.
Read more: Rosalia Torres-Weiner Continues Multi-Dimensional Work Through Pandemic (2021)
Murphy told Queen City Nerve that she hopes the emergence of the historic markers around Charlotte in the coming days will serve as a reminder for all residents of what happened in November.
In a world where the news cycle moves at a rapid pace, she emphasized the importance of not moving on from federal abductions.
“I think that’s exactly the strategy [of the Trump administration] is to do so many terrible things that people feel overwhelmed and like it doesn’t matter, and we get numb to it and accept it as normal,” Murphy said. “Individually, none of us have the power to find these people and bring them home, but we do have the power to continue to acknowledge that our community has been disrupted and we’re not going to go back to normal.”
Thank you for this important story. I wish that I had known of this event ahead of time. I live on the eastside and was incensed about the CBP incursion in Charlotte, as well as their previous invasions in LA, Chicago, and Portland. I agonized over their “daily catches” and was incensed at the videos of their blatantly criminal actions and total lack of due process to their victims. I’ve yet to hear the govt release the names of those they detained and disappeared, nor of what charges were applied to them. Sen. Tillis and Rep Adams have both asked the Dept of Homeland security for a listing of names and charges. Rep Adams has yet to heard back. I’ve called Tillis’s office numerous times without ever speaking to a person and have left messages asking if DHS had ever replied to them. I have not heard back from Sen. Tillis’s office. Yesterday, I called NC Attorney Gen. Jeff Jackson’s office and left a message to see if they have asked for that information. The last days that CBP was here there was witnessed CBP snatching what was thought to be a young teen female that was walking along Sharon Amity. I have heard nothing else about that event and it has haunted me given how they were often randomly picking people up based on appearance and locale.