NC’s Latest Anti-Immigration Legislation Adds to the Culture of Fear
What does HB 318 mean and how is it implemented?
On July 29, Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly pushed through the state’s latest anti-immigration legislation with the help of a lone Democrat who helped override Gov. Josh Stein’s veto.
House Bill 318 — titled the “Criminal Illegal Alien Enforcement Act” — builds on House Bill 10, which requires law enforcement to notify agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when an individual with undetermined legal residency is charged with certain offenses.
While House Bill 10 only required law enforcement to check a person’s immigration status if they were charged with a violent crime, House Bill 318 amended the list of offenses to include all felonies, some serious misdemeanors and impaired driving.
If a judiciary official issues what is called a “detainer” on the charged individual, the law enforcement office must hold them for an additional 48 hours — on top of the initial 48 hour hold — to allow time for ICE to retrieve the person and take them into federal custody.
Stein vetoed HB 318 and another piece of anti-immigration legislation, Senate Bill 153, in June.
“I am vetoing House Bill 318 because it is unconstitutional,” Stein said then. “My oath of office requires that I uphold the Constitution of the United States … The Fourth Circuit is clear that local law enforcement officers cannot keep people in custody solely based on a suspected immigration violation. But let me be clear: anyone who commits a serious crime in North Carolina must be prosecuted and held accountable regardless of their immigration status.”
However, the following month, Republicans in the NCGA voted to override the veto with the help of Democratic NC Rep. Carla Cunningham. Cunningham was the only Democrat to vote to override the veto, though it was her comments leading up to the vote that garnered blowback from many voters and fellow party members.
Presenting her case in support of HB 318, Cunningham repeated talking points used by the Trump administration to justify mass deportations and other nationalist policies.
“As a people, it is time to recognize that it’s not just the numbers that matter, but also where the immigrants come from and the culture they bring with them to another country,” Cunningham said. “As a social scientist reported, all cultures are not equal. Some immigrants come and believe they can function in isolation, refusing to adapt. They have come to our country for many reasons, but I suggest they must assimilate. Adapt to the culture of the country they wish to live in.”
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She went on to say that “naïve” Americans “have been exploited and abused by the different tactics to gain citizenship in America.”
As head of the agency most directly affected by the new law, Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden said he believes HB 318 places an undue burden on the state as it requires a state magistrate judge to request a hold on behalf of the federal government and authorize the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) to adhere to federal matters in turning someone over to federal custody.
State magistrates decide to hold a person for an additional 48 hours — time that costs Mecklenburg County taxpayers $398 a day for each person in custody, McFadden said.
The sheriff has been an outspoken opponent of all past iterations of HB 318, including HB 10 and the 287(g) program, which allowed participating state and local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents and which McFadden ran on a platform to do away with.
He terminated the county’s participation in the program in 2018.
Who asked for House Bill 318?
After a person in custody meets the criteria of their release and the additional 48-hour hold begins, the MCSO must notify ICE within two hours of the detainee’s release.
ICE then has the obligation to pick that person up from MCSO while their original charges are still pending.
McFadden told Queen City Nerve that this procedure creates a cyclical process in which detained individuals are not held accountable for any state charges.
If ICE agents deport the person to another country and that person returns to the United States and comes into contact with law enforcement again, the person is then put back into the state judicial process and it starts all over again.
”That is the issue that I had from the very beginning [that] was not addressed in House Bill 10 and it was not addressed in House Bill 318,” McFadden said. “House Bill 318 is still interrupting the local, state judicial process when people have state current pending criminal charges,” he said.
Carolina Migrant Network co-founder Becca O’Neill said ICE doesn’t have the capacity to pick up everyone who has a detainer.
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Though O’Neill said this may change once ICE reaps the benefits of the “Big Beautiful Bill” and its $75 million in funding for ICE, the current agency doesn’t have the resources to send officers to each of North Carolina’s 109 jails and transfer them to the state’s only detention center in Alamance County.
In a March email to county commissioners, McFadden said ICE failed to pick up 163 detainees at MCSO since December, costing the sheriff’s office $65,000 to house them.
The communication — or lack thereof — between MCSO and ICE was on full display in January after Honduran citizen Jose Napoleon-Serrano was charged with assaulting a female and domestic assault.
Serrano, who had already been deported from the US twice, was arrested by CMPD and held at MCSO after ICE issued a detainer.
An ICE officer accused McFadden of not honoring the detainer placed on Serrano and neglecting to call the agents 2 hours before his release, according to WSOC-TV. Because ICE did not pick Serrano up within the detainer time period, Serrano posted his bond and was released from custody.
McFadden claimed his office received no correspondence from ICE following the detainer while ICE claimed that McFadden was being “uncooperative.”
These are claims that McFadden has grown used to, he said, as they began “30 minutes after I took office seven years ago.”
McFadden explained that he believes the blame is not equally placed on ICE or the North Carolina lawmakers who enact these bills but instead creates a rhetoric that local sheriff’s offices in places that are largely African-American and Democrat-run aren’t cooperating with ICE.
“So we know that this is the vehicle and platform that our local lawmakers build very well and present it to the local media … that we are not cooperating with ICE,” he said. “We are cooperating with ICE but the issue is no one is listening to what we are saying, how this is not making our community safe.”
McFadden said that local lawmakers who create these immigration bills may not be educated enough on the topic and don’t meet with the sheriffs that have concerns and deal with it directly.
He said he would like to see state, local and federal officials come together with a task force or group to create a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Instead, McFadden said that “we are now simply just making things up as we go with immigration and it is not making our cities any safer.”
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O’Neill said the impact of HB 10, passed in a veto override vote in November 2024, has been to create fear, which is evident in the way entire communities are afraid to leave their homes out of fear of being detained.
The bill has also led to more people being detained by ICE.
“And then now I think HB 318 is an attempt by the General Assembly [to try] to tighten or fix [HB 10] because I don’t think they are getting the results they wanted from HB 10,” O’Neill said. “And so now there’s an attempt to make it work and make it worse.”
Because there are still 21 counties in North Carolina with 287(g) agreements in place, O’Neill questions the validity and effectiveness of HB 318. Paired with McFadden’s vocal condemnation of the bill and the burden it places on the state and its taxpayers, the question remains: Who wanted this bill?
O’Neill pointed at the Republican-led NC General Assembly.
“[They’re] a bunch of racist assholes … [with a] weird fixation where they’re going to constantly pass anti-immigration bills the same way they’re going to pass bills that are going to target trans people and educators,” she said.
“They lack any fundamental understanding of these systems and they really, really, really hate immigrants.”
A veto override vote for Senate Bill 153, titled the North Carolina Border Protection Act, is expected in September.
