By Brandon Kingdollar, NC Newsline
Aug. 3, 2025
As residents rally to alert neighbors to immigration agents around the city, Durham City Council member Javiera Caballero warned Saturday that anyone could be arrested off the street and detained.
Speaking to an audience of around 70 at a “State of Durham” town hall held in the Durham County Main Library, Caballero said the massive boost in funding given to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the recent congressional megabill would only embolden the agency to abduct noncitizens and citizens alike.
“Once that money really hits, what’s going to happen to our community is actually quite terrifying. And so when I say we’re going to have to put our bodies on the line, it’s not hyperbole,” Caballero said. “They will disappear folks, they will kidnap folks, and it’s not just going to be folks who, quote, shouldn’t be here.”
Though the discussion, moderated by organizers with Kids Voting Durham and a journalist from INDY Week, ranged from housing and transit to education and crime, the presence of ICE and other ways the city might be targeted by immigration enforcement proved a recurring source of anxiety among audience members.
Caballero said she was proud of the city for mustering an “amazing community response” to ICE agents spotted at the Durham County Courthouse, apparently seeking to detain a man ahead of his initial court appearance. Their presence became widely known through immigrant advocacy group Siembra NC’s “ICE Watch” program, which trains spotters who monitor their communities for ICE amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
“Those are the kinds of things we’re going to have to be doing, bringing attention to it and then really fighting for our community,” she said. “When we say that Durham is a welcoming place, it’s not just a tagline — we believe it.”
“It’s About Mass Deportation”
Nida Allam, who chairs the Durham Board of County Commissioners, said standing up to ICE will take a collective effort from residents.
“Showing up when there’s ICE sightings, making sure community is out there to witness, record, document what is happening to make sure that our community stays as safe as possible, and that there’s a record of these incidents so that way we can protect our community,” said Allam, among the local officials who spoke out at the courthouse last month.
She pointed to the case of Greensboro man Mohamed Naser, a Libyan father of five detained in July who has spent weeks in a Georgia detention facility. Though he was granted bond, ICE denied his release. “He has been here on a valid visa, is a pending asylum case, and unfortunately, they have taken him away from his family, he’s the main breadwinner,” she said.
“We know that U.S. citizens have been taken all over this country already, and kept in detention for weeks while they’re trying to get legal services to get themselves out,” Caballero said.
Durham School Board Chair Bettina Umstead stressed that “every student is welcome in our public school system,” and noted that they do not ask for the immigration status of enrollees. Asked how Durham Public Schools would address ICE agents attempting to come onto the property, she was circumspect.
“Our principals all have a guidance document around what to do in the public school system, and I think there was a message sent to families that we are aware of what’s going on,” Umstead said. “We want to be really mindful of what we’re sharing publicly to everyone to make sure that our policies and procedures around safety at school stay something that remain private.”
Rep. Marcia Morey (D-Durham), who billed herself as the bearer of bad news throughout the forum, said the passage of House Bill 318 over Governor Josh Stein’s veto would only expand ICE’s ability to seize North Carolinians. The bill requires sheriffs to vet the immigration status of detainees and hold them beyond their time of release pending ICE action.
“It’s no longer about public safety, it’s about mass deportation, and it’s right out of the Project 2025 playbook,” Morey said. “We’re still going to fight it, we’re going to do all we can to take that back.”
After she alluded to the fact that the bill became law only after a single Democrat joined with Republicans to override the veto, an audience member interrupted: “Let’s name her name, Carla Cunningham.”
“What’s Affordable?”
In stark contrast to clashes over immigration, Durham officials described continued support from the federal government in expanding the city’s and region’s transportation infrastructure.
“The federal government hasn’t really cut transit dollars — that’s not what we’re seeing so far,” Caballero said. “That’s one space that we’re kind of very much holding our breath around, but the federal dollars are still moving forward.”
She described the city’s plan to move forward on a bus rapid transit project through a federal grant, upgrading a line from Duke Hospital through downtown to Wellons Village, one of the highest ridership communities in the city. “Bus rapid transit is basically your regular bus line but way nicer and faster,” she said.
At the interstate level, Caballero noted that federal funding also continues to support the S-Line “Raleigh to Richmond” Amtrak expansion, which is set to create a faster passenger train line connecting Washington to Atlanta through North Carolina and neighboring states. She urged residents to make their voices heard in the upcoming midterm elections to ensure that elected members of Congress continue to support the state’s transit initiatives.
She expressed frustration, however, that so much of the state-level transit dollars are tied to the widening of old roads and the construction of new ones — to the point that the Triangle West Transportation Planning Organization, which she and Allam serve on, expects to forgo much of the North Carolina Department of Transportation funding.
“Having an effective General Assembly that doesn’t hate its cities would be great,” Caballero said. “[We decided] we didn’t want to take NCDOT dollars that were just going to expand roads and make them wider, that we really wanted to move away from that, that it did not align with our goals around transit and climate.”
Allam said transit and housing affordability are the two biggest issues where she sees the potential for bipartisan collaboration. She noted that Johnston County, long a Republican stronghold, is on track to be the fastest growing county in the state from now to 2055 — creating the same pressures around growth that have long affected more urban and left-leaning areas in the state.
“Affordable housing 10 years ago was a Raleigh issue, a Charlotte issue. It wasn’t a Johnston County issue, it wasn’t a Person County issue,” Allam said. “And now, it is.”
Morey said affordability would be out of reach so long as workers in the state are underpaid.
“What’s affordable? When you’re paying people $7.25 an hour minimum wage that hasn’t gone up in 20 years, how are you ever going to have affordable housing?” she asked. “Putting a down payment, the rent, the dream of buying a house is going out of reach for people and we need to do better.”
“Bored Kids Cause Trouble”
Another area of concern around federal funding is education, city officials said, pointing to after-school and summer programs that rely on money from the Department of Education that has been in doubt. Those funds were frozen by the Trump administration and only released after lawsuits from dozens of states, including North Carolina.
“When that federal freeze happened in the summer, there was a lot of concern from community partners that work directly with our Durham Public Schools students over, can we fund our program? This is where students go after school,” said Umstead, the school board chair.
Officials connected the existence of these programs and other educational opportunities with crime prevention. Discussing gun violence, Umstead touted a “text-to-tip” program allowing students to report potential threats as well as mental health investments like therapy provided on school property.
“The role the school system needs to play is to make sure students have connections to all the opportunities that are listed there,” Umstead said. “How do we make school an exciting place for students to be, that’s a connector to the other places?”
Caballero, a mother of three teenagers, pointed to crime reports showing teenage boys getting access to guns, often stolen out of unattended vehicles, and warned that “bored kids cause trouble.”
“There’s not enough for them to do, you can’t even go to an arcade in most places in Durham because it’s a 21-plus establishment, and so we have to do better by our youth,” she said. “How do we, as a community, make sure that we’re offering what we can to our kids and keeping them busy?”
Speakers also criticized attacks on reading materials and diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools. Morey called a set of bills seeking to ban DEI in North Carolina “horrific,” and said it was vital that lawmakers uphold Stein’s vetoes on them.
“It is criminalizing a concept, diversity, equity, inclusion, our country is built on,” Morey said. “In my eight years, they’re the most despicable bills I have ever seen.”
After the forum, resident David McCole said the bills seeking to ban DEI were his top concern. He added that he was impressed with Morey’s earlier comments on income inequality, adding that he was glad she called out tax breaks given to corporations under changes to North Carolina’s fiscal policy.
“Our General Assembly is not doing enough or anything to look at where we stand and helping our workforce, the people at the lower level of the economic scale,” he said. “How do we improve their ability to be able to afford things such as rent or housing, things along those lines? I loved her comments on that.”
Attendee Najerie McMillian said she was disturbed by the ongoing ICE arrests in the community.
“It’s disheartening to hear what ICE is doing. They’re actually going to schools and churches trying to pull people out,” McMillian said. “It’s actually U.S. citizens, people born and raised here, whose parents and grandparents were born and raised here, getting snatched up too.”
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