ICE突袭致企业受损，消费支出永久下降140亿美元

It was a Saturday morning when we first saw the SUVs. You can see my customers are doing their laundry, routine day, and then this gentleman that saw ICE coming through, he runs through the laundromat and all my customers follow after him. I could just see their fear. Individuals were getting quite literally snatched off the streets very indiscriminately in our part of town. In November 2025, The Department of Homeland Security launched a major operation in North Carolina.

Among the areas most affected was along Central Avenue in East Charlotte, home to a large immigrant community. There was just agents arresting people at supermarket parking lots. They're going to work. You cannot arrest workers and then claim to want economic development for the state. The operation started on a Saturday. On the following Monday, businesses were shutting down left and right. No more ICE, No more ICE.

Congress has given ICE a very specific authority, which is to remove individuals that don't have a legal right to be in this country. While the initial shock of the raids in Charlotte has subsided, they've had unexpected long-term effects and indicate how Donald Trump's immigration policy is impacting the American economy. It was mid-November when the operation happened. After that, it's kind of like, OK, everything is back to normal.

Nothing is happening. The crisis is over. But actually what we continue to see was more arrests in East Charlotte specifically. They target early morning work vans, vans that look like construction work. These are not people that are a threat. These are folks that are going to work. And now all of a sudden, these workers are not there anymore. It's just kind of really paralysed the economy. My name is Greg Asciutto. I am the executive director of a community-based nonprofit called CharlotteEast.

People are struggling across the board right now. Business is down. So you have a beauty salon, Sav/Way, a couple smaller hyper-specific businesses like Yolandas, her dress shop down there. She does quinceaneras, Lempira, a Honduran restaurant. Just a really great mix. A really, really strong community. Many businesses had to immediately adjust if they did not fully close, adjust their business practises. The groceries, I mean, they were definitely impacted too, but because of the nature of their industry, they weren't impacted at the same level as Manolo's who does cakes for quinceaneras and special events.

It was a completely different ballgame. In total nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security says more than half a million people have been arrested and deported during these operations. As an economist and business school professor, as I was watching, it struck me that behind the background of the people doing the chasing and being chased, there's businesses. How are they affected by this? And I found that the decline in spending was about $14 billion, which is a decline relative to the year before.

And what surprised me about that is that these weren't temporary blips. It wasn't that the decline kind of happened quickly and then we went back to normal. The decline was permanent. On weekends, our parking lot would be full. I mean, it would be packed. And ever since those first several weeks, there was hardly any cars. As time has gone by customers have just dwindled, really. My revenue has dropped at least 50, 60%.

I have a video of ICE picking up a customer of mine. That's, that's about as much as, I don't know what happened to him. And what I've experienced ever since then is that a lot of families have left. A lot of folks have left on their own. Patience and lot, lots of prayers. It's going to take a long time to recover from, from everything that's been happening, really. Analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek of data from Placer Labs Inc.

A company that uses location signals from mobile devices to calculate foot traffic, revealed a significant slowdown for 18 small businesses along Central Avenue. You might think that this effect is confined to those most likely to be targeted by ICE. Immigrants and Hispanics, right? They would be the ones who are afraid. They're the ones who aren't showing up to work. Not the case. Data from across the country indicates that even in areas that have a below-average immigrant and Hispanic population, foot traffic and spending are down.

People now have less income. They have less money to spend. And that can create a really bad negative cycle because if you have less money to spend, now businesses are receiving fewer patrons and fewer spending per patron, which means that businesses have to cut back, which means that they're not hiring, which means that they're paying less in local taxes. And you can really kick off a downward spiral if that's a permanent effect.

The impacts in East Charlotte aren't confined to small businesses. Churches and local schools both reported declines in attendance during and after the raids. If you have hundreds of thousands of children not showing up to school or partially showing up to school, they're not able to build the human capital that they need in the long run to be productive citizens, productive workers, et cetera. That's very hard to quantify right now, but it's going to affect their ability to pay taxes, their ability to work as productively as perhaps they could.

It's one thing to suffer a temporary drop in foot traffic or spending in a business. It's another thing when an important percentage of your workforce and your citizenry is not as educated or capable as they could be because you've scared them to death from showing up to school. This map is a map of North Carolina, and what we do is we've uploaded data of confirmed attentions or confirmed sightings of ICE. North Sharon Amity is clear two miles each direction from Central, period.

Onto Albemarle, period. We're looking for tinted vehicles, people in plain clothes with their typical tactical vests. I'll look up and down the streets and look through parking lots of apartment complexes, construction sites. Look out for those also. There's been threats of doxing to our organisations, volunteers. And just because of what the Trump administration is doing, I don't feel safe being known that I'm doing what I'm doing.

It's calmer on the streets now, but there's still residual fear. Hi, good afernoon, Siembra hotline. We have a hotline. And in the last month, we have received 874 calls. People call us when their loved one gets detained. We provide navigation, support of that detention, legal referrals. There's a solidarity fund. If you think about it from like just an economic perspective in the state, these are folks that are contributing to the economy.

People are left without the person that, that works in the household. Families can lose their homes. Sometimes they take one parent and not the other, even though they're in the same asylum case. Police. Open the door. We frame the entire issue of immigration as a safety issue, something that you need to be protected from. But if I could scream anything from the rooftops, it would be that we need to stop thinking about immigrants as just people who come here and they're a body who fills a job.

Immigrants are also consumers. In the United States, it's estimated that immigrants have at least $1.3 trillion in discretionary income and spending power. That's money that they spend on your business, on the products and services that your business is offering, and they sustain your livelihood. If you look at our immigration system and our immigration laws, it is complete nonsense. For one, it hasn't been updated since 1990.

And now fertility rates are so low in the United States, we're well below replacement rate. So the number and types of visas that we give legally don't make sense for an economy that has grown almost 3 times since 1990. We need more people for our growing economy. We need different kinds of people with skills that our legal system does