Here’s what happened: Around 4:15 p.m. last Wednesday, Siembra NC — an advocacy group that trains community members statewide on how to spot and verify ICE activity — sent out a text alert about suspicious federal agents near a company located on Emerson Street in Wilmington.
The company being investigated was Port City Distro, a wholesale provider of smoke and vape products.
The alert went out in response to a post in an online Facebook group for local Latino and Hispanic residents that used language suggesting people were being lined up and arrested.
Soon, ICE verifiers headed to the area to confirm whether or not the federal agents were on the scene for immigration enforcement. One of the verifiers told WHQR about why they were on the scene.
“We do some training to make sure we verify that they’re police, if they're police doing business, that they're doing police business, and not doing like, ice raids or like kidnapping people, and that's like, outside of their jurisdiction," they said.
But verifying what was going on was harder than it might seem. It eventually turned out the agency conducting the operation was the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, or NCIS, a civilian-led agency within the Department of the Navy that investigates acts of felony crime and terrorism.
One agent, who had half their face covered, refused to show any identification:
"I'm out here in the middle of God and country," the agent said.
When asked why he would not provide at the very least a business card, the agent said, "Because I don't want to."
Though one of the NCIS agents presented their ID, the only other information the agents would give was the address to their website.
After a couple of hours, the NCIS agents packed up and left. There was no sign of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and no people were outside being arrested. Still, this whole event didn’t sit well for the verifiers, especially one in particular.
Anna, a verifier who asked to only be identified by her first name out of concern for her family’s safety, wanted to stitch up any loose shreds of doubt.
“We left somewhat unclear, other than it just seemed like, yes, there were some federal agents conducting some kind of law enforcement action,” she said.
So Anna did some more digging into Port City Distro, and she came across their website. After some scrolling, it was clear that they deal in wholesale smoke and vape products.
WHQR reached out to the company and confirmed that last week’s raid was not ICE-related. However, no one from Port City Distro could divulge what the probe was about, nor could they confirm whether NCIS found evidence of illegal activity.
The only thing the Port City Distro employee stated was, “I’ll just say, if they found something, we would not be here.”
WHQR filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out more about the investigation; NCIS denied the request do to this being an ongoing investigation.
Raids and undercover investigations are fairly common for smoke shops in the Cape Fear region, as evidenced by press releases from local law enforcement.
As one worker of a local vape shop in Downtown Wilmington, who asks to remain anonymous, pointed out, “I hear a lot of stories from other people I work with, other vape shops around especially in Fayetteville and Brunswick County where they shut everything down.”
The worker told WHQR that raids are primarily local police conducting undercover operations, wearing civilian clothes — usually without masks.
“Sometimes they come in with, like an underage person, trying to sell something but mainly they come in to check the flower and just make sure it's not actual marijuana," he told WHQR. He added that sometimes illegal substances are found as a result of these searches, so he understands that law enforcement is just doing their job.
The employee of Port City Distro says he was told by NCIS agents that sometimes masks are worn for their protection when conducting a search warrant.
But at a time like this, Anna says the lack of transparency from some law enforcement agencies, in this case NCIS, does not make people feel safe.
“For me, it feels like military gear, you know, with vests and guns like, the fact that that is happening in my city with lack of clarity, especially the face covering part, yeah, is really unsettling to me," she said. “Even if it turns out it was not, you know, ICE related, I'm left with the question, is this actual common law enforcement practice now?”
But she says the silver lining is knowing there are people in the Cape Fear region who stand in solidarity with the migrant community.
