When federal agents detain immigrants while they're working, as they increasingly have, the tools of people's trades often get left behind: a day laborer's pickup truck. A street vendor's food cart. A trolley of tortillas abandoned in the grocery store parking lot where agents nabbed the deliveryman.
Those reminders out in public, of jobs left unfinished and lives abruptly interrupted, usually disappear when family or colleagues retrieve the belongings.
But in Charlotte, North Carolina, Rheba Hamilton, a retired grandmother and active Democrat, decided to leave out for all to see the evidence of what happened when Border Patrol agents showed up at her house ready to take away the men working there.
In her case, it's a partially decorated 10-foot pine tree in her front yard. By this time of year, it's usually fully wrapped in Christmas lights. But this year, only the very tip of it is. An unfinished string of lights dangles down the barren side.
"It looks completely ridiculous," she said. But she decided to leave it that way "as a symbol of what happens when ICE and Border Patrol get involved in your world. Things don't go as planned. And a lot of work doesn't get done."
On Nov. 15, a convoy of Border Patrol agents descended on Charlotte as part of an enforcement surge the Trump administration had said it would carry out in the city. The two men Hamilton had hired to help string her lights had just gotten to work that morning when an unmarked minivan pulled up out front. Two agents got out, came onto her front lawn and started to question the workers.
Hamilton, terrified they might be arrested, knew that filming might help. She grabbed her phone and came down from the porch. In the video, you see the masked agents ask the workers several times, in Spanish, what country they're from and whether they're U.S. citizens. For several tense seconds, the men stay quiet. Hamilton follows the agents around her lawn, filming it all. Then suddenly, they end their questioning and run back into the van and drive off.
After they left, her workers rushed to their truck and sped off, leaving behind a ladder and a pine tree that looked like it could be cast in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Hamilton is considering inviting friends and neighbors to help her finish the decorating job as a way to bring her community together after the Border Patrol's weeklong enforcement surge in Charlotte left many people in the city frightened and angry.
But for now, she's left it unfinished because she considers it a potent statement about what she believes are the harmful human and economic costs of the Trump administration's aggressive immigration agenda.
Hamilton said she loves law enforcement, but considers what immigration agents are doing cruel. That's why she decided to get between them and her workers. She worried that "they maybe would never see their families again. I think a lot of people would've done exactly what I did."
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about the incident at Hamilton's home.
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