On Central Avenue in Charlotte, North Carolina, Manolo’s Bakery has become a focal point for resistance to the upscaled immigration raids since border patrol officers descended on the city at the weekend. The owner closed the bakery to prevent his staff from being targeted. Most of the other shops on Charlotte’s busy immigrant-centric street followed suit.
Dozens of people have taken up camp in the parking lot to wave signs of support for immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been active in the city for months as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda but things went up a level when border patrol arrived. Agents swiftly began buzzing through the place to make an armed show of their presence, followed at times by Charlotteans honking their horns in warning.
Gerardo Ortiz is Puerto Rican, which is to say, a born American with a Spanish accent, which was good enough for ICE and border patrol, it seemed. Protesting with the group, Ortiz said, he was picked up twice by federal agents prowling Charlotte’s streets this week while they looked to capture undocumented immigrants.
Which might backfire if we are lucky. One of the ways gerrymandering works is by diluting the votes, spreading them into many other areas where they don’t make a large enough fraction to matter. The more gerrymandering happens this way, the slimmer the margins are for holding the seats. If these actions galvanizes the gerrymandered voters to turn out in unexpectedly large numbers, or turns enough fence sitters against them, the gerrymandering will lead to many seats flipping instead of only the few it would have been without the gerrymandering. I don’t find it likely to happen, but I’m not ruling it out either.