Trump administration investigating millions in funding for Charlotte transit system after
The Trump administration has vowed to investigate Charlotte, North Carolina’s transit system in the wake of outrage following the fatal stabbing of a Ukrainian refugee on a city light rail train in August.
“I can’t pull money today from their transit system. I actually have to do an investigation. That’s what the law requires,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News on Monday. “If I find what I think I’m going to find, they’re not going to have your federal tax dollars going to their public transportation system. Zero. None. Nada.”
The Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) told The Independent it “welcomes any conversation with our partners at USDOT.”
“They work closely with transit agencies across the nation and are a valuable partner with CATS,” the agency said in a statement.
The Independent has contacted the mayor’s office for comment on the investigation.
The Transportation Department investigation joins a group of other inquiries about the incident, in which a homeless man stabbed Iryna Zarutska, 23, multiple times on her way home from work.
The North Carolina state auditor’s office is also investigating CATS, citing a string of recent violence in the system, and the Department of Justice on Tuesday charged Decarlos Dejuan Brown, Jr, 34, a local man with a history of violent crime and apparent mental health difficulties, with causing death on a mass transit system.
The brutal killing, captured on the Lynx Blue Line’s security camera, has provoked outrage among local leaders and national politicians alike, exposing a deep partisan divide on public safety issues.
The Trump administration and its conservative allies have accused the city and the governor’s office’s Democratic leadership of being responsible for the crime, while using the attention of the moment to push for their favored candidates and policies.
“The blood of this innocent woman can literally be seen dripping from the killer’s knife, and now her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday, adding that “only Republicans will deliver” law and order and endorsing the GOP candidate in the 2026 race for one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats.
The White House also claimed in a statement that death was the “culmination” of policies like state efforts in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system and explore reducing cash bail.
In recent weeks, the administration has issued executive orders seeking to end cashless bail.
Conservatives have long criticized the practice as allowing criminals to return to communities, putting safety at risk, while liberals criticize the steep racial and wealth disparities in who is able to pay cash bail to secure their release. Studies have shown that cashless bail is not linked to hikes in crime and may help reduce recidivism.
MAGA influencers have also claimed the stabbing is not getting the same kind of media attention as the 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man whose murder by Minneapolis police sparked nationwide civil rights protests.
“This is a civil rights issue,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon wrote on X on Tuesday, sharing a photo in which the murder suspect, who appears to be Black, towers over Zarutska, who is white.
Brown has been charged with murder at the state and local level, but officials have not publicly described any racial motive in the killing, nor any direct link to state efforts to reduce disparities in the justice system.
Critics accused the Trump administration of politicizing the tragedy to advocate for its own law and order priorities, including extending the kind of mass federal law enforcement presence seen in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
“Trump’s MAGA allies are trying to use the tragic murder of a service worker in Charlotte, North Carolina, to justify its illegal occupation of U.S. cities,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber, a prominent North Carolina civil rights leader, told The New York Times.
Local leaders, including Democrats like Mayor Vi Lyles, have also called for change.
In an X post on Monday, Lyles described the killing as a “tragic failure by the courts and magistrates” and called for a ”bipartisan solution to address repeat offenders who do not face consequences for their actions.”
Brown, the suspect, has a lengthy past criminal record, including at least 14 previous arrests, including a six-year sentence for armed robbery. After his release from that sentence in 2020, Brown was diagnosed with schizophrenia and began acting “aggressive at home,” his mother told The New York Times.
At the time of the stabbing, Brown was under court orders to be mentally evaluated if he could stand trial for a January charge of misusing the 911 system, following an incident in which he allegedly made comments during a police welfare check about being given “a ‘man-made’ material that controlled when he ate, walked, talked” and became upset with officers when they said they could not help him.
Over the past two years, the city of Charlotte has doubled the number of transit security workers and tripled the system’s safety and security budget from $5.8 million to nearly $18 million.
During the first two quarters of the year, overall crime decreased eight percent compared with the same period last year, while violent crime fell 25 percent, according to Charlotte police.
