When scores of masked federal agents swarmed into Charlotte last month, veteran journalist Rafael Prieto was shocked by what he saw.
Armed men snatched immigrants from front yards, parking lots and work sites, pulled them from cars and threw some to the ground. Anxiety spiked for many of Mecklenburg County’s 175,000 Hispanic residents. Businesses closed. Students stayed home. People who needed medical help were afraid to get it.
Prieto, 71, a naturalized citizen from Colombia, did something he’d never done. “I carried my passport in my pocket for the first time ever,” he said. “These (agents) didn’t respect anyone or anything.”
“Operation Charlotte’s Web” disrupted lives and families and raised concerns throughout the community. It made national headlines. It’s just one of many Trump administration policies that have impacted people here.
Roughly a year into the second Trump administration, changes have frayed federal safety nets and upended practices once taken for granted. They’ve affected housing, health care, food security and education. New policies have impacted how people live and, in at least one case, where they live.
“We need to acknowledge the attack that we’re under and do what we can to support our nonprofit service providers, who are meeting increased need with fewer resources,” said Kathryn Firmin-Sellers, president and CEO of United Way of Greater Charlotte.
The effects aren’t hard to find. Mecklenburg County health officials had to lay off people working to slow the spread of HIV. Housing advocates are scrambling to ensure that people who get federal housing aid don’t lose it. Food banks are coping with the loss of one federal assistance program and cuts to another.
“Ultimately our super-hero cape is not big enough to shoulder the crisis that the federal government has created,” said Tina Postel, CEO of Nourish Up, a local food pantry.
Border Patrol officials said they went after “the worst of the worst,” though offered no proof for most of the more than 400 people detained in Mecklenburg. But the arrest last week by police of an undocumented immigrant for allegedly stabbing a light rail passenger reignited concerns among some – including President Donald Trump.
Some say the federal budget cuts reflect spending constraints as well as philosophical differences in the role of the federal government.
“It may just be a differing view of what the federal government should do going forward,” said Republican Tariq Bokhari, a former Charlotte City Council member who briefly served as deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration.
The cuts in federal spending have come at a time when some nonprofits have seen private philanthropic and charitable gifts decline. Tracy Russ, a senior vice president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, calls it a kind of “double whammy” that he expects to get worse.
“What I’m most fearful of is what these impacts look like a year or two from now,” he said.
For many service providers, the “double whammy” comes at a fraught time. With inflation up 25% since 2020, more families are squeezed.
“The need has never been greater in the 50-year history of Crisis Assistance Ministry,” said Carol Hardison, its longtime CEO.
New Rules Could Displace Hundreds in Mecklenburg County
Karen Pelletier, director of the county’s Housing Innovation & Stabilization Services, remembers how she felt when she saw November’s email from federal housing officials.
“Helpless and concerned,” she recalls.
The email confirmed that the federal government was making a major change in housing policy by essentially ending Housing First. That program is based on the notion that housing should be a prerequisite for people dealing with addictions or mental illness, not a reward for overcoming them. Advocates say it’s got a track record of success in getting people off the streets and under roofs.
“All the research will tell you that Housing First is the appropriate course of action,” said Firmin-Sellers. “The model is that you get people into Housing First and then you provide the wraparound supports to help them stay there.”
The new policy would enact work requirements and require – not just encourage – addiction or mental health treatment. Federal aid would be temporary and designed to help people transition to private housing. The New York Times called the policy shift “the most consequential in a generation.”
“That completely erases the 10 years of success that we’ve had in Housing First,” Pelletier said.
Devon Kurtz of the conservative Cicero Institute told the New York Times that, “Housing First simultaneously expected too much of people, by assuming everyone was ready for housing, and too little, in terms of the lack of expectations for sobriety and work.”
But nationwide, experts say the new approach could cost 170,000 people their homes, including many who are elderly or disabled. In Mecklenburg, Pelletier said 513 people currently live in so-called “permanent supportive housing.” She said the change could displace hundreds who’ve been stably housed for years.
“Without this assistance, many of them are going to end up back in our homeless system,” Pelletier said. In a community that already has more than 2,300 homeless people, what that means is unclear.
“We don’t have capacity in our shelter system,” Pelletier said.
A Fraying Public Health Safety Net
Federal budget cuts. Vaccine skeptics. Looming Medicaid cuts. Rising health insurance costs. No single threat keeps Dr. Raynard Washington awake at night.
“They all keep you up,” said Washington, the county’s public health director.
He lost more than a dozen employees to budget cuts or program changes. That includes disease investigation specialists specializing in HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. Though some jobs were restored, the interruption led to delays.
“The consequence of that is somebody else gets exposed to a disease,” Washington said.
Chelsea Gulden, executive director of RAIN, a nonprofit focused on HIV, told Qnotes that because of federal budget cuts, “we are poised to see numbers of HIV increase in a way we have not seen in years.”
Washington has seen evidence that more people appear to share Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines. That includes public doubts about an early childhood vaccine that can prevent pertussis, or whooping cough. Washington said the number of pertussis cases, normally around two, jumped to 70 in the past year with outbreaks often concentrated.
Washington said there’s been a rise in the number of families seeking religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements. They “simply don’t know who to trust,” he said.
One out of three Mecklenburg residents – 416,000 – receive benefits from Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. County officials say as many as 31,000 could lose them under new federal work requirements. They say that could grow to more than 80,000 if North Carolina’s Medicaid expansion program ends.
The N.C. General Assembly has yet to act on that program, which serves more than 687,000 North Carolinians.
Then there’s the pending expiration of extended subsidies for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In Mecklenburg, that’s more than 135,000 people, according to Nicholas Riggs, director of the NC Navigator Consortium. He said premiums could soar.
Carolyn Willey of Indian Trail said her family of three has been paying around $400 a month under the ACA. Because her husband’s income as a general contractor rose to where they would lose their federal subsidy, they would now have to pay $1,200 a month for basic coverage.
“We were shocked to see it was going up that much,” Willey said.
Food Assistance Shrinks as Need Surges
On a sunny fall morning, Brittany Mays waited in her car outside an east Charlotte church that doubled as a mobile distribution site for Nourish Up. She’s a mother of four whose husband was laid off from a car dealership. They relied on SNAP – the federal emergency food program – until it was suspended during the 42-day government shutdown.
“With the change in income and not being able to afford the high price of groceries… it means a lot,” she said of the food donation.
The shutdown only exacerbated the challenge for Mecklenburg’s 137,000 SNAP recipients. Federal help has fallen sharply. Nourish Up, for example, has seen a 50% drop in help from the Emergency Food Assistance Program. Another program, which would have provided $11 million to food banks around the state, has ended.
This year, Congress added work requirements to the SNAP program and shifted some costs to states and counties. Officials say the work requirements alone could result in 17,000 county residents losing benefits.
“What just baffles me beyond comprehension is the lack of compassion in all these policies for lower- and middle-income people,” said Tina Postel, Nourish Up’s CEO. “How much more cruel can you be to keep food off the plates of children and seniors on fixed income and hard-working individuals who just aren’t making a livable wage?”
Policy Shifts Deepen Fears in LGBTQ+ Community
Annelise Mennicke has received a lot of research grants in her career, including from the National Institutes of Health. But she never lost one until this year.
Mennicke, who teaches in UNC Charlotte’s School of Social Work, had received a $450,000 grant from the NIH to help members of the LGBTQ+ community who became victims of sexual assault. Mennicke is research director for the university’s Violence Prevention Center.
In March, she got a letter from the NIH. “This award no longer effectuates agency priorities,” it read. “Research programs based on gender identity … do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.” Such studies, it added, ignore “biological realities.”
One of Trump’s first executive orders said, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”
Mennicke’s was one of 19 federally funded grants terminated at UNC Charlotte, according to school officials. Her grant was restored this summer when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a mixed ruling in a case brought by the American Public Health Association.
But for Mennicke, “‘emotional roller coaster’ doesn’t begin to describe this experience.”
“I’ve been having panic attacks,” she said. “I’ve had trouble being present with my family. I’ve spiraled into existential crises around whether I can stay in academia, in North Carolina, or even in the United States. My grandmother fled Germany in 1939 to flee the Nazis … How did she know it was time to flee? How will I know?”
Amanda Dumas knew.
She was a Huntersville town commissioner until this fall when she and her 14-year-old transgender son moved to Canada. Like many members of the LGBTQ+ community and their families, she saw an increasingly threatening political environment. Then, she said, Atrium Health stopped offering gender affirming care this summer.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Dumas, who has dual citizenship. “There’s no reason for us to stay if we can no longer even access health care.”
DEI Rollbacks Reverberate Through Local Institutions
On the day he took office, Trump signed an executive order calling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs “illegal and immoral.”
“That ends today,” it said.
Ra’Shawn Flournoy, executive director of a health care center that caters to Black members of the LGBTQ+ community, has said DEI caused the center to lose a grant dealing with prevention of sexually transmitted infections.
“Our STI grant was cut,” he told Qnotes, “and because of the DEI mandate … the administration had actually even called us and said because we had language that had DEI in it, we had 48 hours to change it before we lost all of our funding.”
UNC Charlotte had already closed three DEI-related offices in 2024 to comply with system-wide UNC policies. Money and staff were reassigned to other programs.
This year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools lost about $6.8 million in grants to support teacher development and recruitment because they were perceived to foster DEI. Board Chair Stephanie Sneed said CMS still has to deal with the diversity of a district where 146 languages are spoken.
“Our district is majority-minority, and that demands that we lead with intentionality,” she said. “Programs that support multilingual learners, cultural diversity, and student-specific needs are not optional – they are essential to ensuring every child has access to rigorous instruction and real opportunity.”
Sneed said her more immediate concern is the well-being of the system’s 44,000 Hispanic students. With federal agents in town, some kids went to school with handwritten notes attached to their book bags saying, “I am a citizen.”
“It is the emotional impact that this has had on our families, which affects the ability to learn,” Sneed said. As many as 30,000 students missed school on one day during the crackdown. Sneed worries that they might not have had the breakfast or lunch they can get at school.
“It’s a cascading impact,” she said. “It contributes to our children being successful in our school district.”
Funding Cuts Undermine Charlotte’s Mobility Gains
Opportunity – or the lack of it – was the theme of a 2014 study by Harvard researcher Raj Chetty. It ranked Charlotte and its surrounding area last among 50 U.S. cities in upward mobility. It was a wake-up call that prompted a concerted community effort to improve. The Charlotte area rose to 38th in last year’s Chetty rating.
Tonya Jameson, director of Civic Advancement for Leading on Opportunity, a nonprofit created to foster mobility, said the federal cuts don’t help.
“If a mother or father can’t feed their family, how can we expect them to be able to go to work and advance economically?” she said. “Now you’re forced to just be in survival mode.”
A survey of around 200 nonprofits by UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute for the Foundation for the Carolinas and United Way of Greater Charlotte found that 30% reported cuts in public funding this year. Forty-seven percent reported losses from other sources.
The survey found that while most reported greater need for services and resources, 31% were serving fewer clients. “A growing barrier to community access of (nonprofit) services and resources was fear, particularly among marginalized communities,” the survey found. The full report has yet to be released.
“The threats are not just the federal budget cuts but … people aren’t giving as much generally,” said Tracy Russ of the Foundation for the Carolinas.
Ivan Canada, president and CEO of the N.C. Center for Nonprofits, said individual giving to many of the state’s 14,000 nonprofits has declined since Covid. One reason is that with higher standard tax deductions, there’s less incentive for some to give.
By some measures Americans are still generous. Giving by individuals, philanthropies and corporations rose to $592 billion in 2024, up 6.3% from the year before, according to Giving USA. But there are warning signs.
“There’s been a decline in trust in institutions in general and also with nonprofits,” said Michael Thatcher, CEO of Charity Navigator, a national ratings agency. “For the first time ever in 2024 the trust in nonprofits dropped below that of for-profit institutions. That’s new.”
It’s not just local funding cuts that affect Mecklenburg.
The end of solar tax credits could cost jobs in Mecklenburg’s clean energy industry, said Zach Amittay of E2, an advocacy group. It says the county has nearly 20,000 clean energy jobs.
And Internal Revenue Service cuts could cause delays in the free tax preparation services offered by the Davidson-based Ada Jenkins Center. Marsha Clark, director of the center’s asset building program, expects to help 3,200 clients next year.
“The bottom line is slowdowns,” she said.
Despite Challenges, Charlotte’s Resilience Endures
In late November, Manolo Betancur, whose Central Avenue bakery became an unofficial center for protests during the immigration crackdown, spoke at Myers Park Baptist Church.
“We used to feel alone,” he said. “I never thought we’d see this army of friends.”
During the crackdown people with camera phones videoed agents making arrests. Parents showed up at school parking lots to ensure students were safe. Churches and volunteers across the city collected and delivered food to families holed up at home. Students at several high schools walked out to protest the federal action.
“Allies are learning how to help their neighbors,” Stefanía Arteaga, co-founder of the Carolina Migrant Network, told the Guardian newspaper. “(W)here this administration is trying to sow division, we see an organic movement of community members trying to provide support and assistance.”
Like the volunteers, people in the business of helping others believe Charlotte is a resilient community. Nonprofits coping with reduced budgets and other challenges have been working together.
In September, representatives from groups that included many non-profits packed a room in the Government Center. They shared their challenges and talked about ways to deal with them. They know, as Firmin-Sellers said, “There is no amount of philanthropy that can fill the gap that is being created.”
“We’re a tough bunch,” Firmin-Sellers said. “And we’re an optimistic bunch (or) we wouldn’t be doing this. “And so in spite of all the challenges, I think leaders are more engaged and more determined to continue to do as much good as we can with what we’ve got.
“The nonprofit leaders in this community continue to inspire me. And they should inspire us all.”
Shifting Ground is a reporting project from the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative. The series explores how federal policy and funding changes are impacting Charlotte residents, neighborhoods, and organizations — and how communities are responding. Follow more stories at charlottejournalism.org/shiftingground and join the conversation at upcoming community events.
