Deciphering “Charlotte’s Web”: Aceituno v. DHS and the Burden of Proving an Ongoing Practice

Charlotte’s Web is a story about a spider who saves a pig.[1] In North Carolina, it is also the name of a federal immigration enforcement operation. On November 15, 2025, agents arrived in Charlotte for what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” detaining people on sidewalks, at construction sites, on church grounds, and in the parking lots of Latino-owned businesses.[2] And if anyone expected the operation to wrap up quickly, a DHS spokesperson made clear that it is “not over and it is not ending anytime soon.”[3]

Aceituno v. Department of Homeland Security

In February 2026, five Latino men who live in North Carolina, several of them U.S. citizens, sued DHS in the Western District of North Carolina after immigration agents stopped or arrested them.[4] An amended complaint filed October 1, 2026, added a sixth plaintiff, Fernando Vazquez Orea, a U.S. citizen born in Raleigh whom agents handcuffed at a Cary construction site and later left on the side of the road.[5] The plaintiffs challenged three alleged practices: stops without reasonable suspicion, and warrantless arrests made without individualized findings of removability or escape risk. They asked the court to certify classes, declare the practices unlawful, vacate them under the Administrative Procedure Act, and enjoin them.[6]

Before reaching the merits, the court faces a threshold question: do these plaintiffs have standing to ask for this relief at all?

Standing and the Lyons Problem

Article III limits the judicial power to actual “Cases” or “Controversies.”[7] Therefore, to have standing, a plaintiff must show an injury in fact that is concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent, that is fairly traceable to the defendant, and that a court can redress.[8] A past injury supports damages, but forward-looking relief requires a future injury that is “certainly impending” or at least a “substantial risk.”[9] That is a problem for the Aceituno plaintiffs. Every remedy they seek looks forward, and every injury they allege has, well, already happened.

The leading case is City of Los Angeles v. Lyons.[10] Police stopped Adolph Lyons for a burned-out taillight and choked him until he lost consciousness.[11] The Supreme Court held that he lacked standing to enjoin the chokehold practice because his past encounter did not show a “real and immediate threat” that it would happen again.[12] He would have had to allege that he would be stopped again and either that every officer always chokes the people he stops or that the city “ordered or authorized” that conduct.[13]

The claims of the Aceituno plaintiffs rest on the latter option. They claim DHS leadership has authorized a practice of suspicionless stops and warrantless arrests, pointing to internal DHS documents, officials’ public statements, and more than 6,400 ICE arrests in North Carolina between November 2025 and August 2026.[14] The government’s response? A January 2026 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) memorandum which the government says requires probable cause for warrantless arrests.[15] The plaintiffs, unsurprisingly, say the question is what agents actually do, not what the memo says.[16]

Paying to Stay Safe

The most interesting change in the amended complaint is not a new legal theory but a new kind of fact. The original complaint relied mostly on the plaintiffs’ fear of being stopped again.[17] The amended complaint describes what that fear costs them: hours each week tracking ICE sightings in group chats, longer commutes on back roads, and favorite places and pastimes given up to stay out of sight.[18]

Concrete costs, however, do not automatically establish standing. In Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs “cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.”[19] The Fourth Circuit applied that rule in Beck v. McDonald, rejecting credit-monitoring costs as an injury where the risk of identity theft was speculative.[20] So the plaintiffs’ self-protective costs count only if the underlying threat is real.

However, the Clapper plaintiffs could not show they had ever been surveilled, and their theory rested on a “highly attenuated chain of possibilities.”[21] Here, every named plaintiff has already been stopped or arrested, and the government said the operation would continue. The chain is short; the plaintiffs drive to work through neighborhoods where agents patrol. Their avoidance allegations also work as evidence, placing each plaintiff on the roads, at the job sites, and in the work trucks the alleged practice targets.[22]

The government’s best authority is Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, which suggested that plaintiffs challenging roving immigration patrols in Los Angeles likely lacked standing under Lyons.[23] But Vasquez Perdomo arose on an emergency stay application, which asks only whether the government is likely to succeed; therefore, it is not a ruling on the merits on whether the plaintiffs actually have standing.[24]

Conclusion

For now, standing only gets the plaintiffs in the door. If they clear it, they still have to certify their classes under Rule 23, which requires “a common question”[25] whose answer will resolve each class member’s claim “in one stroke,”[26] and then win on the merits. Here, the steps overlap because the same evidence of an authorized practice that supports standing also supplies the common question for class certification.

If the court accepts the practice theory, North Carolinians subjected to these stops and arrests could obtain declaratory and injunctive relief in a single proceeding.[27] If it applies Lyons and Beck strictly, each person would be left to seek damages individually, after the fact, and only if he can clear the steep barriers to suing federal officers for constitutional violations.[28]

In the book, Charlotte saves Wilbur by getting the whole farm to believe what is written in her web.[29] The Aceituno plaintiffs have a similar job: showing a federal court that their injuries are connected strands of one web, an ongoing practice whose pattern spells out what Lyons requires: a “real and immediate threat” that they will stopped or arrested again. Whether they can will decide how much forward-looking relief, if any, North Carolinians in their position can get.

[1] See generally E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952).

[2] First Amended & Supplemental Class Action Complaint, at 3–8, Aceituno v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., No. 3:26-cv-00146 (W.D.N.C. Feb. 24, 2026) [hereinafter Amended Complaint].

[3] Class Action Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, at 39, Aceituno v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., No. 3:26-cv-00146 (W.D.N.C. Feb. 24, 2026) [hereinafter Complaint].

[4] Id. at 6–8.

[5] Amended Complaint at 46–48.

[6] Id. at 74–76.

[7] U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 1.

[8] Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560–61 (1992).

[9] Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 568 U.S. 398, 409 (2013).

[10] City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983).

[11] Id. at 98–99.

[12] Id. at 97–98, 105.

[13] Id. at 105–06.

[14] Amended Complaint at 59–65.

[15] United States’ Memorandum in Support of its Motion to Dismiss at 22–23, Aceituno v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., No. 3:26-cv-00146 (W.D.N.C. Feb. 24, 2026).

[16] See Amended Complaint at 64–65.

[17] Complaint at 41.

[18] Id. at 42–47.

[19] Clapper, 568 U.S. at 416.

[20] Beck v. McDonald, 848 F.3d 262, 276–77 (4th Cir. 2017).

[21] Clapper, 568 U.S. at 410.

[22] Amended Complaint at 42–47.

[23] Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, 146 S. Ct. 1, 2 (2025) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).

[24] Id. at 2.

[25] Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(a)(2), (b)(2).

[26] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. 338, 350 (2011).

[27] Amended Complaint at 65–68.