The granddaughter of Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White is speaking out against the Department of Homeland Security after the agency borrowed the name of his beloved children’s book for a major deportation operation in North Carolina. Martha White, who manages her grandfather’s literary estate, said the agency’s use of the title “Operation Charlotte’s Web” clashes sharply with the values that shaped both the book and White’s broader writings on democracy and civil society.
White’s comments come as DHS agents descended on Charlotte over the weekend, arresting at least 81 people within the first five hours of a planned enforcement surge. “We are surging resources there and we won’t stop until Charlotte is safer,” DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Fox News.
But for Martha White, the agency’s decision to anchor its public messaging in the imagery of Charlotte’s Web felt deeply out of step with her grandfather’s worldview.
In a statement shared with CNN, she said E.B. White “certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons. He didn’t condone fear-mongering.” She added that he “believed in the rule of law and due process,” and that invoking his work to sell a mass roundup betrayed the principles he articulated in his fiction and essays.
E.B. White, in addition to writing Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, penned numerous essays on democracy, fairness, and public life — essays his granddaughter has helped edit and preserve. To see his language repurposed for an immigration enforcement campaign, she said, “was not something he would have supported.”
The operation’s branding drew even more scrutiny after Gregory Bovino, the border patrol official leading the effort, quoted Charlotte’s Web in a post on X. “Wherever the wind takes us… we take to the breeze, we go as we please,” he wrote, echoing the moment in the novel when Charlotte’s spiderlings float away to begin new lives. He added: “This time, the breeze hit Charlotte like a storm.”
White pointed to that contrast — a book about kindness reframed as a metaphor for raids — as emblematic of how the operation disregards the spirit of her grandfather’s work.
The controversy follows another backlash over DHS branding. Last month, the family of Illinois student Katie Abraham objected to “Operation Midway Blitz,” which officials said was named for her. In an open letter, her mother wrote that her daughter would not have wanted to be linked to an operation where “kids witness their parents being taken into custody on their way to or from school.”
In Charlotte, reports of fear and disruption have continued to emerge, including an incident in which masked agents approached a church during a yard-work event while children played nearby. Some parishioners ran into nearby woods; one was detained, the pastor told The Charlotte Observer.
