Charlotte’s resistance has shown Kentucky how to stop extreme cruelty of ICE | Opinion

The crew replacing the sidewalks in my Lexington neighborhood arrived at 7:30 am. Rain was predicted later that night, so they wanted to finish the concrete pouring they’d started the day before. It was damp and overcast, and they worked hard, all day, in the cold.

Toward sunset, mist gathered and began to drip off the trees, marring the new concrete, so the crew built a temporary structure of two by fours and plastic over the long stretch of sidewalk to protect it.

It got dark. They were still working. Dinner came and went. They worked on, stooped beneath the plastic, smoothing the concrete. At 10 pm they were still out there, working in the cold dark beneath the lights they’d set up. I went to bed before they left. Later I learned that they finally called it a day just after 11 pm. That crew worked harder for those 16 hours than I’ve seen people work in years.

The next day? They were back on the job at 8 am.

Except for one, all the men on this team were immigrants.

I’ve seen this same dynamic over and over, and so have you: industrious teams of immigrants doing hard jobs with excellence: roofing, landscaping, building houses, installing stone. Immigrants work invisibly all around us too, in restaurants, on horse farms, at racetracks, and cleaning houses. They keep our economy going.

Look back in your family history and you’ll find immigrants there, the ancestors who arrived in this country with very little, who worked and sacrificed to make better lives for themselves and the descendants they would never know.

Last summer, the Republican-led Congress passed a bill that drastically cut many essential things, like cancer research and Medicaid, while at the same time giving ICE a huge influx of our tax money — over 37 billion dollars a year, a larger budget than the armies of many countries. They claimed ICE would only be deporting violent criminals.

Yet in the wake of this bill, we have seen atrocity after atrocity unfold against law-abiding and hardworking people in LA and Chicago, where masked ICE agents descended on Home Depot parking lots, day care centers, and landscaping crews, targeting anyone with brown skin. People with legal status and even US citizens have been targeted and held. ICE has traumatized mothers, detained students, left children without parents, and shot pepper balls at priests in the act of prayer. This administration has abandoned due process and violated both our Constitution and the most basic sense of human decency.

Last week, ICE showed up in Charlotte, N.C., inflicting the same terror there. But North Carolinians were prepared for their arrival. I was moved and strengthened to see images of a church filled with several hundred people, all being trained in how to protect their friends and neighbors — people who then spread out across their city to help. More than 30,000 students walked out of schools across Charlotte to protest the presence and brutal tactics of ICE. As a result of this pushback by ordinary citizens, ICE pulled out of Charlotte after just a few days.

So far, ICE hasn’t come to Lexington, but they could appear at any time. The hardworking men who did such a good job on the sidewalks could be whisked away and ill-treated simply because of the color of their skin. This is wrong; it is both unconstitutional and cruel. I don’t consent to this, and we don’t have to consent to it as a city or a state.

Right now, there is a proposal moving through the Kentucky State legislature that would force all law enforcement in Kentucky to sign 287(g) agreements with ICE. This bill would take away local control — which means this bill would take away our voices and our freedom. It would make us all complicit in the violence and abuse of other human beings — sometimes of our fellow citizens — that we’ve seen from ICE.

We, the people, can stop this bill in its tracks. Let’s do it. Let’s be as strong and brave as the citizens of Charlotte and stand up for our neighbors, for our Constitution, and for the abiding dignity of every human being. It is the right thing to do, and it is in our own interests. For make no mistake: if this administration can ignore our Constitution and deny due process to one group of people, then none of us are safe.

Lexington resident Kim Edwards is author of the international bestseller “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” and other books.

This story was originally published November 25, 2025 at 6:00 AM.