He was molded to be the ACLU’s “national model for how a progressive sheriff might run his department” in 2018 when that powerful organization funded his election as sheriff of Mecklenburg County, NC, which includes the crime-plagued city of Charlotte. Now, Garry McFadden is being urged to resign by Democrats and Republicans alike amid ugly allegations involving mob-like extortion tactics, using the power of his department to pursue personal vendettas, and strip clubs.
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“Democratic state Rep. Carla Cunningham and four of McFadden's former employees [on Jan. 5] joined in a petition to remove the sheriff from office,” Axios reports. “The filing in Mecklenburg County Superior Court alleges that McFadden asked Cunningham to vote down certain legislation, stating, ‘I don't want to see you get hurt; you live in my county.’ Cunningham took McFadden's tone as a threat, ‘akin to a mafia boss.’”
Other allegations listed in the petition are just as seedy.
McFadden “directed deputies on ‘dignitary duty to pick up officials of the National Sheriffs Association who were in town for a conference, and to drive those officials to bars and strip clubs’ in [sheriff’s office] vehicles, according to the filing,” The Charlotte Observer reports.
He is also said to have used “sheriff’s office vehicles for personal travel... [w]eaponized his agency’s internal affairs division and started ‘investigations of deputies, detention officers, and civilian staff based on (his) personal animosity towards them, when there was no suspicion of any actual misconduct.’”
This was supposed to be the golden exemplar of ACLU pro-illegal alien local law enforcement. What’s that they say about one crime [illegal immigration] opening the way to more and more illicit activity?
Sanctuary Sheriff ‘Refused to Do His Job’
Immediately upon occupying his position in 2018, McFadden fulfilled a campaign promise to end all cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel on the deportation of illegal aliens residing in Mecklenburg County. He knew who he owed his position to.
“The day after the vote in Mecklenburg County, McFadden, who had just won the Democratic nomination, called the ACLU.’s national political director, Faiz Shakir, to thank him. Shakir told me that he encouraged McFadden to make Mecklenburg into a national model for how a progressive sheriff might run his department,” The New Yorker reported in June 2018. As is common in blue-dominated cities, winning the Democrat nomination for office means certain victory in the general election.
Republicans have lambasted McFadden for thwarting ICE efforts to clear Charlotte and its surrounding area of particularly dangerous illegal aliens.
“Border Patrol is in Charlotte because Sheriff McFadden refused to do his job,” state House Speaker Destin Hall, a Republican, wrote in a November X post as the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Charlotte’s Web. “His sanctuary policies blocked hundreds of ICE detainers and pushed criminal illegal aliens right back onto the streets. They’re stepping in to clean up his mess and restore safety to the city.”
Undoubtedly due in large part to this willful lack of local policing, the Charlotte area has become a beacon for illegal aliens. “More than 30,000 students, about 20% of enrollment, were absent across 185 Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools [on Nov. 17 as the federal deportation operation got underway], the [school] district said,” CNN reported.
‘Charlotte Is Bleeding’
Of course, it’s not just illegal immigration that is thriving in Charlotte. This is the city that horrified the nation in August when a man with 14 prior arrests viciously slit the throat of a woman he did not know on a commuter train as she was placidly sitting and minding her own business.
“Charlotte is bleeding. In just one week in October, eight lives were claimed by violent crime,” GOP Rep. Mark Harris (R-NC) wrote in an op-ed for The Carolina Journal on Nov. 6. “In a single 24-hour period in October, four innocent lives were brutally taken by homicide. In another 24-hour span this November, three more lives were claimed.”
As has been seen in blue-run cities like Baltimore and Washington, DC, Charlotte touts a declining violent crime rate as citizens recoil from the carnage piling up all around them.
“Crime in the Queen City has clearly spiraled. While the media is puffing up numbers that crime is decreasing, those stats don’t tell a holistic story,” Harris related. “Uptown has seen a 200% surge in murders through the first three quarters of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Citywide in Charlotte, a single week in early October recorded 12 shootings, one stabbing, and three homicides. Aggravated assaults involving knives or guns rose to 111 in the first three quarters of 2025 – already exceeding the 86 reported for all of 2024. Strong-arm robberies also climbed, with 31 incidents in 2025 so far, versus 26 in 2024.”
Let us not forget the ACLU’s vital role in all this death and senseless destruction.
“The process of electing local sheriffs is being poisoned by a financially powerful outsider group eager to see that laws it does not like are not enforced. Is this really that different from Al Capone owning police captains back in the day?” Liberty Nation News wrote in 2018. Seven years later, the results speak for themselves.
