CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The incoming Trump administration is considering locations and talking to private prison companies about expanding immigrant detention centers that would hold immigrants before they can be deported, according to two sources familiar with the matter who shared that information with NBC News.
The goal is to double the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds, as the President-elect Trump seeks to fulfil his promised mass deportation plan.
Rusty Price leads Camino, an organization that's been serving the Charlotte Latino community for decades. He said the city has seen a huge influx of people from the border but doesn't believe mass deportation is the right solution.
“The big fear from the community is that, if you’re undocumented, and you can’t get a driver’s license, and you drive into work building the houses we live in, and you get arrested, then you could be deported from a small thing like that," Price said.
He said Charlotte leaders have worked collaboratively with organizations like his to manage the immigration crisis in the city and believes violent criminals should be deported, not asylum seekers.
The Trump administration said it plans to focus on deporting violent offenders first but hasn't committed to stopping there.
“[Asylum seekers have] come in, and they’ve contributed so much," Price said. "We really need to do the opposite of deporting. We need to recognize the ones that are here working hard and give them a way to become legal.”
As discussions on what the Trump administration's deportation plan could look like continue, Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly are making progress on their own effort to crack down on illegal immigration in the state.
“Whatever we can do to try to get these folks who are repeatedly committing crimes off the streets and into ICE custody, I think, the better," Rep. David Willis, a Republican out of Union County, said. "It makes our communities across the state safer.”
Willis, who helped sponsor House Bill 10, said they now have the votes to make a bill into a law that would require sheriffs to work with federal immigration officials to detain people in the U.S. illegally in some circumstances.
"What we're talking about is someone who's been picked up for a rather serious crime, I mean we're talking, you know, assaults, rapes, murder," Willis said. "If they've been picked up for something like that, it shouldn't be much of a stretch to ask our law enforcement to check the system to make sure that there's not an ICE detainer on them for something else and, if so, then to hold them. And, what we've seen is, time and time again, folks are being released back onto the streets. They're committing additional crimes, and a lot of this could have been prevented."
The bill, which passed both chambers earlier this year, was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. A Republican supermajority allows lawmakers to override his veto and pass the bill into law, which could happen as early as next Tuesday.
Contact Kayland Hagwood at khagwood@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.