Federal agents deployed to Charlotte for immigration enforcement, despite rejections from local leaders
‘No Border Patrol In Charlotte’ rally on November 15, 2025. (Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(CHARLOTTE, N.C.) — A surge of federal agents arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday to take part in immigration arrests despite protests from the mayor and other local officials.
Eyewitnesses filmed and photographed several incidents where masked agents arrested residents. Paula Walker Coleman filmed one of the incidents at a parking lot and told ABC News she witnessed agents arrest another woman who was filming.
“She was close to their car recording and her hand hit their car while recording so they jumped out the vehicle. That’s why she was saying her hand was shaking and that’s what made her touch their car,” Coleman told ABC News.
The Border Patrol operations, led by U.S. Customs and Border Protection commander-at-large Greg Bovino and dubbed “Operation Charlotte Web,” have not yet had any major clashes with local police or people in Charlotte,” sources told ABC News.
“We are surging DHS law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed. There have been too many victims of criminal illegal aliens and President [Donald] Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem will step up to protect Americans when sanctuary politicians won’t,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement.
Willy Aceituno, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Honduras, told The Associated Press he was forcibly taken into a Border Patrol vehicle and only released after showing his citizenship documents. Aceituno, who works in the Charlotte area, said he had been stopped twice by Border Patrol on Saturday, and agents smashed one of his car windows.
As word of the surge increased during the week, North Carolina officials dismissed arguments by the Trump administration that an increased federal presence was needed.
“We should all focus on arresting violent criminals and drug traffickers. Unfortunately, that’s not always what we’ve seen with ICE and Border Patrol Agents in Chicago and elsewhere in the country,” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, said in a statement Friday.
Stein encouraged North Carolinians to record any “inappropriate behavior” and follow the law.
Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, also a Democrat, released a joint statement Saturday with Mark Jerrell, the chair of the city’s Board of County Commissioners, and Stephanie Sneed, the chair of the local board of education, where they expressed support for their constituents.
“It is critical for all residents to feel secure in our community and know they can live their lives without being fearful while walking down the street, going to school, work or the grocery store,” they said.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) said in a statement on Friday that it is not involved in any planning by the federal agents.
“CMPD officers are not authorized to assist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) administrative warrants, which are civil in nature and not criminal,” the department said.
The North Carolina city of Asheville is also on alert for ICE-related activity in its city, Mayor Esther Manheimer said in a statement Saturday.
“We have learned that Asheville may be a targeted city,” she said. “We believe every person, regardless of immigration status, should feel safe in the community they call home.”
(NEW YORK) — A week into the government shutdown, air traffic controller sick calls are beginning to cause delays and cancellations as a number of airport towers and control facilities don’t have enough staff to properly handle all flights.
Controllers are considered essential workers and are exempt from being furloughed during a shutdown. An estimated 13,294 controllers will continue to work without pay during the shutdown, according to the Department of Transportation’s shutdown plan.
California’s Burbank Airport was hit hardest Monday and was forced to close its tower from 4:15 p.m. through 10 p.m. PDT because it had no air traffic controllers, according to FAA documents.
The airport remained open but flights were delayed on average more than 2.5 hours. Controllers from a San Diego facility handled traffic into and out of Burbank during the tower closure.
“Clearance is closed. Ground’s closed. Local’s closed. The tower is closed due to staffing. You just contact SoCal on the 1-800 number in the green book for your clearance,” a controller can be heard informing pilots on air traffic control recordings, referring to a published listing of airport information.
Several other ATC facilities also experienced staffing issues on Monday. The Philadelphia TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control), Denver Center, Detroit TRACON, Indianapolis Center, Phoenix Airport, and the Phoenix TRACON also had staffing advisories from the Federal Aviation Administration. More than 600 flights Monday were delayed in and out of the Denver Airport and over 200 at Phoenix Airport.
“There have been increased staffing shortages across the system. When that happens, the FAA slows traffic into some airports to ensure safe operations,” the agency said in a statement to ABC News.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), the union representing controllers nationwide, said it’s working with the FAA to mitigate any disruptions in the national airspace.
“It is normal for a few air traffic controllers to call in sick on any given day, and this is the latest example of how fragile our aviation system is in the midst of a national shortage of these critical safety professionals,” NATCA said in a statement to ABC News.
While ATC staffing is at critical levels across the country, it’s rare for it to have impacts on flights due to staffing shortages in places like Arizona or California, according to FAA documents reviewed by ABC News.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a press conference on Monday that sick calls from controllers have been spread out across the region and not from one specific airport or ATC facility, but acknowledged that staffing levels at certain facilities are down as much as 50 percent.
“We don’t have one facility that has had long-term issues with the sick leave. But that is concerning to me. And if someone has to take sick leave, to drive Uber to make the difference, those are decisions they’re going to make themselves. But of course, that’s concerning for us,” Duffy said.
“These are high-skilled, high-performing, safety-driven professionals that I don’t want them driving for work,” Duffy added. “I don’t want them finding a second job to pay the bills. I want them to get paid for the work they’re doing today, keeping our planes in the air and our skies safe.”
Duffy met with controllers handling Newark’s airspace Monday and said they expressed concerns over the added financial stress of the shutdown in an already demanding job.
“The consistent message from these controllers was they’re not just now thinking about the airspace and the jobs they have to do in these towers or TRACON centers across the country. They’re thinking about, ‘am I going to get a paycheck?’” Duffy said. “So now what they think about as they’re controlling our airspace is, ‘how am I going to pay my mortgage? How do I make my car payment? I have a couple kids at home, how do I put food in the table? I’m working six days a week — do I have to take a second job and drive Uber when I’m already exhausted from doing a job that’s already stressful to think about.’”
Air traffic controllers will receive a partial paycheck on October 14 but will not be paid on October 28 if the shutdown continues, according to NATCA. Under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 (GEFTA), controllers will receive back pay after the shutdown ends.
The staffing crisis also led to some heated political exchanges on social media. California Governor Newsom posted on X, saying, “Thanks, @realDonaldTrump! Burbank Airport has ZERO air traffic controllers from 4:15pm to 10pm today because of YOUR government shutdown.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy fired back at Newsom, posting, “News Flash! Your Democrat friends shut down the government because they want to make Americans pay the health care for illegals. And no state has more illegals than California! You care more about illegals than our hard-working American air traffic controllers. If you’re looking for someone to blame, look in the mirror – we all know it’s your favorite thing to do.”
Another aspect of air travel impacted by the shutdown, which is on the verge of running out of funding, is the Essential Air Service (EAS) program. Duffy said the EAS program, which provides airlines with subsidies to fly to rural areas that otherwise wouldn’t have air service because the route wouldn’t be profitable, will run out of funding on Sunday, Oct. 12.
“Air carriers that continue to operate EAS flights beyond October 12, 2025, would do so at their own risk as the Department may not be able to pay the contracted subsidy,” the DOT said in a notice. The notice also says that if carriers continue to operate during the funding lapse, they could be reimbursed on a “pro rata basis,” meaning they might not receive the full amount owed.
The biggest impacts would be felt in Alaska, where air travel is the primary mode of transportation. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski posted on X, saying, “The critical assistance these routes provide makes a disruption on any scale detrimental to these communities, and the local air carriers serving them.”
Murkowski said she is working with the administration to find a solution.
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has called “rapidly reusable, reliable rockets” the key to humans becoming a multiplanetary society. And when it comes to his company’s Falcon 9, SpaceX has shown that a rocket can do all those things.
The Falcon 9 has now completed 542 missions, 497 landings and 464 reflights, according to the SpaceX website.
But to reach the Moon and Mars and establish settlements on both, SpaceX will need its larger, more complex and significantly more powerful Starship and its Super Heavy booster to reach Falcon 9’s level of reliability and reusability.
Soon, SpaceX will have the chance to show that Starship’s successful August flight, the first to complete all its primary mission goals, was no fluke.
Barring a delay due to bad weather or mechanical issues, the stainless steel Starship and Super Heavy booster will conduct its 11th flight test on Monday, Oct. 13, at 7:15 p.m. ET, from the company’s Starbase in South Texas. A mission the company hopes will build on the much-needed success of its previous test. SpaceX will be operating Starship autonomously and there will be no astronauts aboard during the flight.
In late August, Starship and its Super Heavy booster successfully reached space on a suborbital trajectory at a near-orbital velocity, deploying a series of Starlink simulators before returning to Earth with such navigational precision that the reentry was captured on a camera attached to a remote buoy in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“I would give [flight test 10] an A-plus. That was an A-plus performance. The only thing that was a little bit off was that there was some damage in the aft skirt compartment of Starship during the flight, but most of the mission objectives were achieved,” said Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.” “I don’t think this could have gone much better,” he added.
But now, de Weck says SpaceX needs to demonstrate that it can build on its August success and move the program forward with new mission objectives.
“I think the next step is to actually land the Starship, still not go into orbit and stay over multiple orbits, but actually land and recover the actual Starship,” said de Weck. “Recovery of the Starship, an upright landing, with retro propulsion on a fixed platform, that’s the next step.”
SpaceX is not planning an upright, fixed platform landing for the upcoming 11th flight test. Like the previous mission, the Starship will splash down in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy first stage booster, with its 24 Raptor engines, which SpaceX said was previously used during flight test eight, is also scheduled to splash down in the ocean. In several previous missions, it returned to the launch site and was caught by the tower’s mechanical “chopstick” arms.
The development of Starship hasn’t come easily for SpaceX, with several high-profile setbacks along the way. However, despite an explosion on the launch pad during a pre-flight engine test and several explosions and mechanical failures during previous test flights, Musk has long maintained that learning from failures is an integral part of SpaceX’s engineering process.
“I’m not surprised where the program is. It’s moving forward through the usual SpaceX iterative development model, and not surprisingly, it’s behind SpaceX’s ambitious schedule projections,” said Greg Autry, associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida. “But that wouldn’t make it any different than almost everything else that they’ve done in the past, other than that the scale of this is so large,” he added.
Autry is President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the chief financial officer of NASA.
Autry says he’s confident that SpaceX is headed in the right direction and said that Elon Musk and his companies tend to prove their critics wrong in the long run, delivering results even if it takes longer than anticipated.
“About ten years ago, Elon Musk promised me I was going to have a self-driving car shortly, and a lot of people said that was completely crazy. It wasn’t shortly, but I now have a self-driving car. I literally get in my car, push the button, and fifty miles later, I arrive at work. It is amazing. He delivers eventually,” Autry said.
Experts say that making the next generation of U.S.-designed and built rockets and spacecraft work is critical to achieving NASA’s goals of not only returning to the Moon but building a permanent lunar settlement and doing it before the Chinese.
During a late September ceremony at the Johnson Space Center announcing the new class of NASA astronauts, Acting NASA Administrator and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy spoke about the competition for space dominance.
“Now some are challenging our leadership in space, say, like the Chinese, and I’ll just tell you this, I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA or beat America back to the Moon,” said Duffy. “We are going to win. We love challenges. We love competition, and we are going to win the second space race back to the Moon,” he added.
Autry, who first wrote about a new space race with China back in 2010, says China is determined to reach the Moon and dominate low-Earth orbit, but he believes the global competition will push American efforts forward.
“There are very credible people saying that they’re about to eclipse us in the next five years. I think that’s great for the prospect of competition that spurs us to work harder and take our role more seriously, and frankly to put funding into programs that we badly, badly need to fund,” said Autry.
Autry says that today’s space race should be compared to the “Age of Exploration” in the 15th and 16th centuries. He points out that while China had “an ambitious sailing-exploration program” in the early 1400s, European countries overtook the Chinese when the Europeans accelerated their global exploration efforts later in the century, at a time when China was pulling back.
“We are at that same moment in time right now. The countries that aggressively pursue going to the Moon and using the assets of space will dominate human history for the next several hundred years,” Autry said.
Autry believes that the billions of dollars being spent by companies like SpaceX and the federal government to support space exploration, return to the Moon and potentially get to Mars is money well spent.
“The countries that choose to take advantage of space resources will be wealthy, prosperous and happier than the countries that don’t. We have plenty of history to show that,” Autry said.
Autry says you just have to look at the first space program to see the benefits of this kind of investment.
“We would not have the computing environment, AI, the internet, solar power, fuel cells, and a variety of technologies at the level they are now if we had not made those investments that drove so much effort into engineering development and STEM education. It created the boom we’ve experienced since the second half of the 20th century,” he added.
