In roughly 24 hours, about 50,000 migrants crossed illegally from Morocco into Ceuta, overwhelming the Spanish enclave by land and sea. Ceuta’s mayor-president placed the total closer to 60,000. At least 57 people died. The scale was extraordinary, but the lesson was familiar: Once deterrence disappears, a border can collapse faster than a government can restore it.
North Carolinians should not dismiss Ceuta as a distant European crisis. A failed national border never remains a border-state problem. People who enter or are released in Arizona, Texas, or California can travel to Charlotte, Raleigh, Salisbury, or any other community in the country. State lines and county boundaries provide no protection from a federal government that has lost control of who enters and who remains.
Every North Carolina community is therefore a border community. Criminals who disregard the national border do not suddenly develop respect for state lines, county boundaries, or local laws once they reach the interior.
North Carolina has already seen the danger. In December, Oscar Gerardo Solorzano-Garcia, a Honduran national federal authorities say had been deported twice, was charged with attempted first-degree murder after allegedly stabbing 24-year-old Kenyon Kareem Dobie on Charlotte’s Blue Line.
In July, Javiel Pena Sola, a Salvadoran national whom the Department of Homeland Security says was in the country illegally, was charged with three felony hit-and-run counts after a crash near Salisbury killed David Garcia-Obrajero, Homero Pineda Delgado and Esteban Salazar Hernandez.
Both defendants are presumed innocent unless convicted, but these cases show why failed immigration enforcement is not an abstract debate: Its consequences reach North Carolina communities and leave real families to bear the loss.
Nationally, the murders of Laken Riley and Rachel Morin showed the same consequences in their most brutal form. Riley was killed in Georgia by Jose Ibarra, who had entered the country illegally. Morin, a Maryland mother of five, was raped and murdered by Victor Martinez-Hernandez after he repeatedly crossed the southern border. Both men were convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
The argument is not that every illegal immigrant is violent. It is that government has no right to gamble with public safety by releasing removable offenders, ignoring immigration detainers, or obstructing federal enforcement. Angel Families must carry lifelong grief from crimes committed by people who had no lawful right to be in the country. Their losses cannot be dismissed as an acceptable cost of supposedly compassionate immigration policy.
That is why North Carolina lawmakers were right to override Gov. Josh Stein’s veto of Senate Bill 153. The new law requires the Department of Public Safety, Department of Adult Correction, State Highway Patrol, and State Bureau of Investigation to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and establish federal 287(g) partnerships. It also strips governmental immunity from cities or counties that violate North Carolina’s prohibition on sanctuary policies when an unauthorized immigrant commits a crime within their boundaries.
Those provisions matter because sanctuary policies transfer risk from elected officials to ordinary citizens. Local leaders may earn praise from activists by obstructing ICE, but they will not personally face the consequences if a removable offender is released and commits another crime. A police officer, an innocent victim or an unsuspecting family will.
North Carolina has confronted this problem before. In 2019, the US attorney for the Western District testified that Mecklenburg County had ignored ICE detainers involving defendants accused of crimes including kidnapping, strangulation and the rape of an 11-year-old child. Federal authorities were then forced to locate those defendants after they had been returned to the community.
Senate Bill 153 does not turn every traffic stop into an immigration raid. Its central principle is simpler: When someone is already in government custody and federal immigration authorities have a lawful basis to act, state and local officials should not stand in the way. A city or county should not be allowed to create a sanctuary from federal law and then leave its residents to absorb the consequences.
President Donald Trump has restored deterrence at the southern border and demonstrated that mass illegal entry is not inevitable. It responds to policy, enforcement and consequences. But Ceuta shows how quickly progress can disappear when legal incentives change, cooperation collapses, or political leaders lose the will to defend their territory.
North Carolina cannot control every decision made in Washington, but it can refuse to make federal failures worse. It can cooperate with ICE, prevent local officials from shielding removable offenders and give victims legal recourse when sanctuary policies expose them to preventable harm.
A collapsed border does not remain along the Rio Grande. Its consequences can appear on a Charlotte train, a Salisbury road or a neighborhood trail hundreds of miles away. Ceuta shows how quickly a nation can lose control at the frontier. Angel Families show who can be forced to pay after that control is lost.
North Carolina’s new law is not an overreaction. It is a necessary defense of citizens who expect their government to put public safety, the rule of law, and their right to live securely ahead of the political demands of people who entered the country illegally.
