The Brooklyn Rail

The border bisecting the infected fumes of the infested
factories. The utopia of statelessness.
The utopia of transience. They tell us
Lake Michigan is the Central America of the Midwest.
They send us here so we can share hepatitis swabs
with dirty immigrants.
Hold onto your DNA, refugee-citizens,
The only question about life is what does it mean to live it.

— Daniel Borzutsky, “Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018”¹

What is needed is mass struggle that—self-consciously, as far as possible—takes advantage of the political constraints on the repressive apparatus, using its institutional contradictions, rigidities, and brittleness to force it to reveal both its nature and its limits.

— Don Hamerquist, “Militancy After Occupy”²

 

Roundups and Resistance

Over the past several years many had forgotten, or were in denial, that not only is the US a nation of immigrants but that everyone in the US relies on immigrants, directly or indirectly, every single day. At the start of 2025, nearly 16 percent of people living here were born in another country, totaling 53.3 million. Of these immigrants about a quarter, fourteen million people, are undocumented, about one of every twenty-three US residents; around half of all immigrants have become citizens; the remaining quarter have obtained legal authorization to live here.³ Immigrants live next door, build cities, engineer software, run corner stores, clean homes and workplaces, maintain yards, drive rides and meals ordered by apps, research in universities, work in restaurants and butcher shops, care for health, fix cars, breed livestock, harvest fruits and vegetables, and so much more. Undocumented immigrants work far more frequently than other US workers in construction, agriculture, and hospitality, and are overrepresented in other sectors too, even, slightly, among the professional workforce.⁴ Since 1965, the greatest migrations by far have been from Latin America and Asia, with one-fifth of immigrants coming from Mexico. Since the pandemic, more than eleven million new immigrants have arrived in the US, with Asian and African migration declining, South American and European migration growing, and Mexico remaining the top country of origin.⁵ Immigrants live in great numbers in urban areas around the country, like New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and Chicago.⁶

Justifying its behavior by long-told lies that they would target criminals among “illegal” immigrants, the second Trump administration has abducted and terrorized immigrants increasingly indiscriminately, spiking both deportations and self-deportations (where immigrants leave without direct state violence). Administration officials have claimed that in 2025 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its immigration enforcement agencies, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had deported over 675,000 people, and that a further 2.2 million immigrants self-deported.⁷ The numbers are likely inflated; the New York Times counted 540,000 deportations in 2025.⁸ The huge self-deportation estimate, probably sourced from the rightwing Center for Immigration Studies, has been disputed as inaccurate.⁹ In any case, the story anyone with a screen last year would have assumed, that deportations had escalated, was confirmed by the Times report, which showed that 230,000 immigrants were arrested in the country’s interior, a high unrivalled since Bush-Obama’s 2009 fiscal year.¹⁰ To the extent there has been an increase in deportation arrests of people with criminal records, this has involved nonviolent cases; the major deportation operations essentially only surged arrests of people without records.¹¹ Meanwhile, CBP encounters at the US-Mexico border dropped to fewer than 270,000, the fewest since the 1970s, indicating a decline in border crossings.¹² That decline isn’t the only sign of immigrants’ dread; a November 2025 survey showed that forty-one percent of all immigrants now fear deportation, up from twenty-six percent in 2023, jumping most starkly for naturalized citizens and authorized immigrants, though remaining greatest among undocumented immigrants, with three quarters of all undocumented people now afraid.¹³ My mother, an elderly, white, British-born naturalized US citizen, has been sent from reluctant to unwilling to travel by plane.

The White House has made mass deportations core to its economic agenda—alongside austerity, tax cuts and tariffs—claiming that they will raise the wages of citizen workers, reduce housing costs, and provide savings on social welfare programs.¹⁴ The Economic Policy Institute projected in July 2025 that if deportations reach the scale Trump promised, millions of citizen workers will in fact lose their jobs along with deported immigrants, due to the economic interdependence of citizens and noncitizens in the workplace. If 3.3 million immigrant jobs are destroyed, the EPI argues, 2.6 million citizen jobs will be too. Construction and child care labor sectors would especially decline.¹⁵ A study from August 2025 on the impact of the deportations on California’s agriculture industry estimated “a 20–40% reduction in the agricultural workforce, leading to $3-7 billion in crop losses and a 5–12% increase in produce prices.”¹⁶ Broader projections from a macroeconomics institute at the University of Texas estimated that deportations will cause citizen workers’ average real wages generally to fall, and cause modest inflation in sectors and regions with many immigrant workers.¹⁷ More recent reporting in the Wall Street Journal, looking back on the past year plus, claimed that deportations had neither lifted wages nor disrupted labor markets, defying both positive and negative projections.¹⁸ Another report in the Journal indicated there has been no real benefit on housing costs.¹⁹ Finally, the libertarian-conservative Cato Institute has shown, based on a twenty-year study up until 2023, that immigrants are responsible for substantial fiscal surpluses since they pay more in taxes than they receive in welfare benefits, with these surpluses growing even alongside growing deficits.²⁰

The nativist argument that immigrants lower wages for citizen workers perverts the truth, that capitalism tries to coordinate the exploitation of immigrant and citizen workers through their social difference, to the detriment of them all. Marxists have argued that the capitalist function of immigration enforcement is to maintain a cheap labor pool of super-exploited workers, by regulating the flow of immigrants and forcing them to the margins, by marking and punishing their migration as criminal.²¹ Turning enforcement into mass deportation appears to sabotage this, seeking to reverse rather than merely regulate migration. Indeed, last year, more people left the US than immigrated here for the first time in fifty years.²²

Meanwhile, transnational capital subcontracting with firms in the global South benefits from surplus labor displaced from and kept out of the North through low wages.²³ Sociologist David Feldman describes the diverse capitalist interests that the deportation apparatus attempts to coordinate: those government agencies and capitalist sectors that directly enact and profit from the arrest, detention, and removal of criminalized immigrants; sectors, like agriculture, construction, and hospitality, that superexploit their disempowered and fearful immigrant workforces; and, finally, those transnational sectors, like the call services industry, primed to profit from wages lowered by increasing labor surpluses abroad. While at times, these interests may be synchronized, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and repressive immigration policies like Arizona’s SB1070 in the 2000s provided an example of a feast for private detention and border security industries that threatened famine for immigrant-employing domestic capital. In those years, a cross-class alliance emerged between the latter capitalist factions and the immigrant movement, with some of the most extreme policies being struck down in the courts.²⁴ With the rise of what Feldman called, all too aptly in hindsight, militarized migration management, contradictions among capitalists have again emerged under Trump, though, fearing retaliation, corporate opponents have kept fairly quiet.

 

The War on Immigrants

Deporting immigrants serves another constituency as well, the MAGA base inside DHS and the broader nationalist and white, middle-class populace. They gain psychological wages through direct and vicarious violence against these criminalized scapegoats and the supposed sanctuary jurisdictions that many live in. As Nikhil Pal Singh writes in his excellent analysis of the situation at the start of 2026, “Homeland Empire,” “The effort to construct a majoritarian-nativist constituency is now the centrepiece of right-wing politics in the US,” with deportations and repression against racialized and political enemies the domestic counterparts to the Donroe Doctrine. Though perhaps a fragile trend, this constituency in 2024 included historically significant numbers of Black and Latinx US citizens, with the latter substantially overrepresented among ICE and especially CBP agents.²⁵ Unable to reverse deindustrialization, wage stagnation, the growing costs of health care and housing, and so on, supposedly unassimilable (but actually socially segregated) immigrants are blamed for nearly everything, and then retaliated against in video after video of displays of force. While most immigrant arrests have occurred through deputized local and state police and jails in conservative-controlled jurisdictions, Democrat-run sanctuary cities, supposedly the greatest enablers of migration, have been the targets of the major paramilitary operations. Supposedly, Democrats are bringing in immigrants in order to give them social security numbers and then get them to commit voter fraud. Humiliating, terrorizing, and disrupting the institutional normalcy and social lives of these places has clearly been the goal. In part, this appears to be motivated by revenge for the George Floyd uprising, hence the focus on Portland and the Twin Cities.²⁶ But places like Los Angeles and Chicago have become sanctuary cities due to prior waves of the immigrant movement and because these are the places where large communities of immigrants live. As Singh summarizes, “‘Mass deportation’ in this sense serves a range of purposes beyond its ostensible aims: it cultivates a constituency that elevates ancestral primacy, creates a paramilitary policing layer incentivised to assert despotic authority, and justifies governing via broad emergency decree.” The war on immigrants, then, is integral to rising fascism. In an era of flimsy legitimacy for our rulers and the ruling class, deportations are the socialism of xenophobes.

Leaving out even broader conditions, overlapping dialectics of migration and immigrant enforcement have led us here. On the one hand, riffing on Feldman, periodic bursts in migration, whether due to events elsewhere or due to newly developed pathways across the border, have led the immigration industrial complex, opportunistic politicians, nativist movements, and the media to generate moral panics, leading to migration crackdowns, forcing immigrants and their allies to fight back; then, before long, the cycle repeats.²⁷ On the other hand, as told in Daniel Denvir’s All American Nativism, each panic has led to more militarized border and immigration policing, which structurally could not improve the social conditions immigrants are blamed for, leaving them unresolved but with inflamed nativism among reactionaries, providing an opening for Democrats to attempt and fail to outflank the Republicans on enforcement as part of an also failed attempt to broker a deal on immigration reform, stoking the next round of panic.²⁸ All the while, the budget and the political heft of CBP and ICE has grown, becoming a vanguard for ethnic cleansing, as shown by Michael Macher.²⁹ Supported by DHS’s police unions, a reactionary core, with now-disgraced CBP commander-at-large Gregory Bovino as poster boy, continued to radicalize as they were jerked back and forth as if in stop and go traffic, until they finally hit open gestapo road in 2025, led by now-disgraced poster girl Kristi Noem, then DHS Secretary.

One model for today’s mass deportation strategy goes back to the El Paso sector Border Patrol in 1993, on the eve of NAFTA. There, Chief Sylvester Reyes deployed a regional surge in agents for Operation Hold the Line, which succeeded in deterring border crossings in the area. The strategy was repeated on a larger scale around San Diego the following year. Although this paramilitary policing only served to shunt migration routes elsewhere, according to a contemporaneous study cited in the Los Angeles Times, this strategy, under the name “prevention through deterrence,” became the basis for the first national Border Patrol strategy.³⁰ Fear was the point.

It wasn’t until later, under the reorganization of immigration enforcement as part of the War on Terror, that agencies began to expand attention from the border to immigrants living throughout the country. The Center for Immigration Studies developed a new strategy for DHS, referred to as “attrition through enforcement,” with the aim of making it impossible for immigrants to live a normal life, not only out of fear of deportation, with workplace raids and regional sweeps, but also by cutting off as many avenues of support as possible.³¹ Pressure on employers, cuts to social services, making it harder to obtain documents, all aimed to make immigrants so desperate they would self-deport.

Fear and desperation. The Trump administration's mass deportation efforts have mixed and turned up the dial on these strategies, though still failing to meet impossible quotas of 3,000 arrests a day. Macher summarizes many of the key developments on the “attrition” front: “Executive actions dismantled watchdog agencies, exposed sensitive data and spaces to immigration authorities, expanded ‘expedited’ removal, and disregarded due process for legal residents and citizens. Millions have been made ineligible for bond and asylum hearings, while temporary protected status (TPS) has been revoked for one group after another.” Alongside the changes in policy, DHS’s immigrant police branches have cultivated deterrence through terror by increased workplace and home raids, adding raids on previous off -limits schools and hospitals, and, most of all, pretextual sweeps, using new databases and apps for mapping and facially recognizing targets to in fact racially profile everyone in the area. Bridging these two strategies has been the nearly universal adoption of 287g agreements in conservative jurisdictions, which deputize local police into immigration enforcement, turning everyday interactions with the law into openings into a deportation pipeline.³²

All the while, the foul plumbing grows. Federal agencies have been retasked to aid in immigration enforcement; the National Guard has been deployed to the border and to cities. ICE and CBP aim to increase their numbers by 13,000 combined. The concentration camp corporations are at work in public-private partnerships to nearly double detention capacity to 116,000 beds.³³ Infamously, Todd Lyons, now-former acting head of ICE, described their aspiration as creating an “Amazon Prime for human beings,”³⁴ which checks out, given that many of the properties acquired to become detention centers are former warehouses, surplus after the pandemic-era logistics boom.³⁵

 

The Struggle Against Deportation

The movement that unfurled nationwide following DHS’s paramilitary operations around Los Angeles, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and elsewhere, has for now halted the domestic political momentum of the Trump administration after culminating in DHS’s defeat in Minnesota, illuminating impasses of both the Democratic party and extraparliamentary communists, to the advantage of social democrats (who will find impasses further down the road, too). The anti-deportation movement’s watchwords and strategy have codified—ICE Out, community defense, and so on—as have the limits of the federal strategy with heritage in El Paso, as they both now wane with little else settled, inaugurating an interregnum within the greater interregnum.

In the opening months of 2025, observers raised alarm as the Trump administration “flooded the zone” with executive orders and actions, both violent and corrupt, apparently striving for the fascism Trump was previously accused of. The left was divided. At the beginning, some argued that it would all be more of the same. As the flood level rose, many seemed too discouraged to mobilize—by the genocide in Palestine, the ongoing repression on campuses, the failing Democratic opposition, the capitalists united behind Trump, etc. At the same time, resistance liberals initiated the Tesla Takedown protests, finally making Elon Musk and his corporations persona non grata for his embrace of fascism and involvement in DOGE. A number of major court orders stalled the administration; on immigration alone, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was ordered to be returned from detention at CECOT in El Salvador, other CECOT detainees had their due process rights confirmed, and funding cuts to sanctuary jurisdictions were restored.³⁶ Much of the organized left, formal and informal, continued our ongoing collective organizing and mutual aid projects, discussing how better to support the working class under attack, especially immigrants and trans people, and other targeted groups, and preparing for even deeper submergence. In a hint of what was to come, hundreds mobilized in Minneapolis on June 3, after an alleged federal drug enforcement raid on a restaurant involving ICE. Protesters threw objects and blocked vehicles before they were dispersed by force.³⁷

Inside the Trump administration, homeland security advisor Stephen Miller and Secretary Noem were frustrated that deportations weren’t happening fast enough. In a now infamous address at ICE HQ on May 21, Miller demanded 3,000 arrests a day, still hoping to displace one-million people by year’s end.³⁸ Within the fortnight, DHS began surging efforts in Los Angeles. These mobilized Angelenos to defend abducted and threatened immigrant neighbors, resulting in street confrontations and sparking riots, broader community defense organizing, and protests around the country. The dialectic of the anti-deportation movement and DHS mass deportation operations would develop much further from there, as we’ll see.

Evolving since Los Angeles, the movement has been more of a solidarity struggle than one mostly of immigrant participants. Anecdotally, many militants come from prior recent experience with Palestine solidarity. The present movement is in this respect more similar to the Occupy ICE encampments of 2018 than to the previous waves of immigrant movements under Bush and Obama, which were led by immigrants and eventually immigrant youth. Many tactics and slogans, however, have returned. It’s worth skimming that legacy.

As historian Justin Akers Chacón tells the story in No One Is Illegal, the cycle began in 2005 with a campaign of counter-protests in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. Immigrants and supporters countered events held by nativist groups like the Minutemen and Save Our State, and local politicians backing them, who were then riding high on positive press the Minutemen had received after conducting vigilante patrols along the US/Mexico border.³⁹ The nativists failed to rally popular support. Their efforts nonetheless boosted the Sensenbrenner Bill, which would have turned undocumented migration, along with aid to it, into a felony. The bill passed the US House at the end of the year. It was then defeated in the Senate, following the emergence of an immigrant civil rights movement through a series of escalating mass protests, school walkouts, and wildcat strikes in the Spring of 2006, culminating in three million people rallying, many striking, on May 1’s Day Without an Immigrant. They demanded equality, amnesty, and an end to criminalization.⁴⁰

Attempts to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill, which would balance legalization and citizenship for supposed good immigrants with criminalization and deportation for the supposed bad ones would fail through the Obama years. Led by the example of Arizona, several states fought to require local and county police to check immigration papers during stops while passing attrition through enforcement policies.⁴¹ The Obama administration, hoping to win Republicans to a deal, intensified deportations of supposed criminals through their own programs, first called Secure Communities, later rebranded as Priority Enforcement, that integrated federal immigration and local policing through fingerprint databases.⁴² Against the new state laws, local organizing broke out, a nationwide boycott of Arizona was called, and eventually the most representative bill, SB 1070, was partly struck down in the courts.⁴³ Rapid response networks proliferated, organized as phone trees to mobilize people to document and intervene around immigration raids, as did Know Your Rights trainings.⁴⁴ Deportations reached an unrivaled hundreds of thousands of people per year. DHS funding and infrastructure, already born and grown under Bush after 9/11, grew further.⁴⁵ The immigrant youth movement radicalized nationally, acting openly as undocumented, sitting in congressional offices, and even deliberately seeking arrest in order to organize inside detention centers.⁴⁶ They eventually won DACA in 2012 and DAPA in 2014, granting protections to immigrants who arrived as children and to parents of citizens/permanent residents, respectively, though the latter would be blocked in the courts.⁴⁷

The movement won further campaigns at the local and state level. They revived the earlier Sanctuary City demands of the 1980s, to block local police and jails from collaborating with the feds, and won a number of detention center closures. Not One More Deportation, Shut Down ICE, and ICE Out emerged as demands between 2011 and 2014, as abolitionist slogans began crystallizing also in the justice campaigns following the killings of Oscar Grant in 2009 and Trayvon Martin in 2012, eventually coalescing into what we now call the Black Lives Matter movement.⁴⁸

Under the first Trump presidency, the immigrant and anti-deportation movements shifted toward the path taken more recently. On the one hand, major solidarity direct actions responded to the overtly nativist turn of the executive, like the emergence of airport blockades around the country responding to the administration’s ban on Muslim travel within a month of inauguration in 2017.⁴⁹ Similarly, a year later in June, as the administration was criticized for separating immigrant children from their families, militants formed an Occupy-style encampment outside an ICE facility in Portland, OR. Occupy ICE encampments bloomed around the country, popularizing the demand to abolish ICE.⁵⁰ These encampments had their liberal parallels with 700 nationwide marches on June 30 declaring Families Belong Together.⁵¹

Contradictions emerged within the immigrant movement itself, including its youth wing, with organizations reporting membership growth throughout the period ⁵² even while hopelessness at the prospect of reform and deportation fears grew. One catalyst was the administration’s attempt to rescind DACA in September 2017, which provoked youth action in DC that led to a government shutdown in early 2018 but ultimately won nothing.⁵³ Federal district courts eventually preserved DACA in a technical ruling later upheld by the Supreme Court.⁵⁴ Beyond DACA and the sanctuary laws, the immigrant movement won little else in the end, before stalling in a defensive posture forced by the national political deadlock.

In an excellent zine on the subject, updated days after Trump’s return to office in 2025, Chicago’s Lake Effect Collective summarize “Previous Tactics from the Fight Against ICE.” Grouped by function, there are five kinds of tactics: infrastructure disruption, community defense, anti-profiteering, counter-surveillance, and detention solidarity. ICE offices, detention centers, surveillance fusion centers, airports, and the equipment kept at them, have been occupied, blockaded, demonstrated against, and physically attacked, disrupting infrastructure. Immigrant home and work communities have been defended through rapid response networks, with people documenting the events and people involved, directly intervening to block arrests or de-arrest, surrounding and blockading officers and their vehicles. Private corporations provide DHS with physical infrastructure like detention centers, as well as digital infrastructure, like surveillance software, networking databases, social media, and camera feeds. Workers inside these corporations have organized against their employers and people outside them have led boycott and divestment efforts to pressure them to stop profiting from deportations. All of these tactics have been enabled by a wide variety of counter-surveillance, to identify and monitor infrastructure, profiteers, and deportation officers. Finally, prior to deportation, immigrants are held in detention centers. During detention, people have backed them inside through case support, sometimes resulting in release, and outside support by publicizing hunger strikes against cruel conditions, as well as holding noise demonstrations outside to remind those inside that they do not fight alone.⁵⁵

 

Blitzkrieg Bop 

Los Angeles

Once a city of Anglos, not so since the late 1970s.⁵⁶ Though known as a straggling region of freeways, the Los Angeles area is the densest metro in the United States, and the second most populous, with thirteen million people. Today, a third of Angelenos are foreign born, about half of whom are not citizens—double the US average.⁵⁷ About forty-five percent of people are Latinx, with white, Black, and Asian people under-represented by at least half. Still, more white Angelenos graduated college than average, Black Angelenos somewhat more, and Latinx somewhat less.⁵⁸ Squinted at, the picture of the Los Angeles working class splits between white credentialed workers and Latinx non-credentialled workers. More than half of all people in the LA metro area rent, and fifty-seven percent of these tenants are considered burdened by their rent, Black tenants most of all, by a significant margin.⁵⁹ Los Angeles is among the most racially and thus class segregated metros in the country.⁶⁰

The City of LA has declared itself an immigrant sanctuary. Advancing an executive order from late April in the last days of May 2025, DHS released a massive, error-ridden list of sanctuary jurisdictions, and most of Greater Los Angeles was mistakenly included, despite only LA City adopting a policy.⁶¹ The density of Latinx immigrants, its sanctuary reputation, and its centrality to the media establishment (not to mention Stephen Miller’s chipped, Santa Monica-born, shoulder), made Los Angeles at first glance a perfect target for DHS after Miller and Noem raised quotas. In Trump’s words, immigrants had “invaded” LA, calling for war. A Human Rights Watch report, “US: ICE Abuses in Los Angeles Set Stage for Other Cities,” summarized the raids and sweeps that came—

Beginning in late May, federal officials saturated the Los Angeles region with teams of agents who conducted rapid raids where Latino people work or congregate. These raids have targeted Home Depot parking lots and other locations where people seek day laborer jobs; car washes, swap meets, and shopping centers; restaurants, food trucks and street vendor stands; and commercial farms. Agents have arrested workers, customers, vendors, and students. ⁶²

Clashes between Angelenos and the feds, amid deportation arrests, began June 6, after raids at a Westlake Home Depot parking lot and at two Ambience Apparel locations, all near or in downtown LA.⁶³ Community responders arrived too late to the Home Depot, but in time to the Ambience Apparels. Downtown, hundreds confronted the feds, for hours delaying their escape with immigrants arrested, eventuated by DHS violence against the crowd. At the other Apparel, DHS fled more quickly, through an undefended exit, though not without arresting SEIU California President David Huerta who had arrived with fellow responders.⁶⁴ The next day hundreds protested a DHS staging area in southern LA County adjacent to Compton, following raids near a Home Depot, with rocks thrown at the feds and a sedan set alight.⁶⁵ In response, the White House federalized the National Guard, initially deploying 1,700 as well as 700 Marines, to protect federal buildings, like downtown’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), where protests had been ongoing. Several days of rioting followed downtown, with skirmishes occurring in response to raids elsewhere as well. Within a week, LAPD made over 500 protest-related arrests. The City of LA’s Mayor Karen Bass, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, revived the Democratic Party line on such events—balancing rhetorical support for immigrants with condemnation for violent protesters as well as the administration's authoritarianism. While the Mayor instituted a curfew to stop the riots, which she denied were even riots, the State Attorney General sued to release the state’s National Guard, with both efforts essentially failing for the time being. As immigration raids continued, tens of thousands mobilized locally, and many more nationally, in the first No Kings protest on June 14.

While the raids and riots, talking heads and lawsuits, National Guard and resistance liberals marching trace the most visible branches, even more was happening at the roots. Throughout the LA area an anti-deportation movement flourished, in part through the substantial preexisting immigrant and tenant movement organizations, like the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Unión del Barrio, and Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), in part through more informal networks activated only a handful of months prior responding to the Eaton and Palisades wildfires, as well as through people newly catalyzed by the working class militance in the first days of June.⁶⁶

The movement drew tactics from the historic repertoire while improvising new ones. As would also occur elsewhere, the hotlines run by established nonprofit groups, widely publicized as rapid response networks, were found to be too slow, usually documenting abductions after the fact and connecting people to legal aid. Neighbors on the ground organized their own rapid response chat groups, expanding on work that began earlier in the year with the announcement of the Community Self-Defense Coalition. Complementing these, a new model was tested by members of LATU, the community defense center—initially at the Home Depot in Westlake. Centros, as they are often called, create a physical site for militants to meet near where immigrant workers gather and live, to coordinate response and mutual aid. With many immigrants now afraid to leave home for work, to shop, or for school, coordinating grocery distributions became common.⁶⁷ Likewise, hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised to support street vendors staying home from work.⁶⁸ Immigrants sheltering in place also meant that many active on the ground in centros, patrols, and chats were documented, educated, white, or a combination. Centros and chats also became hubs for counter-surveillance. Unión del Barrio, an anchor in the Community Self-Defense Coalition, trained many people in how to patrol for DHS, by monitoring federal staging areas and freeway onramps, and cruising immigrant neighborhoods to identify suspected feds.⁶⁹ Within days of the DHS surge, a new tactic premiered, drawing from counter-surveillance: militants began “a self-organized practice of nightly demonstrations outside hotels suspected of hosting DHS agents,” often succeeding in pressuring hotel management to kick out DHS.⁷⁰ Though protests continued downtown and an Occupy ICE-style encampment even formed outside of the MDC, the LA movement’s major tactical contributions to the broader movement inspired by those early days in June was the proliferation of smaller actions that followed, mobile or focused across many sites, pursuing DHS and defending immigrants and their spaces.⁷¹

After a month of daily struggle between DHS, immigrants, local officials, and the movement, in early July attorneys led by the local ACLU won a case before a US District Court that the DHS sweeps violated 4th amendment rights against unreasonable detention by racially profiling immigrants. Two of the five people represented in the case were citizens, all arrested during the surge.⁷² Whether due to this ruling, the effectiveness of local resistance, White House boredom, a combination of those factors, or something else, in July immigrant arrests declined in Los Angeles. They rose again, inconsistently but on average, for the rest of the year, following the US Supreme Court allowing DHS in September to continue profiling pending appeal.⁷³ By then, the channel had changed for the administration’s paramilitary spectacle, first to DC before moving on in October to Chicago.

California Democrats, led by State Senator Scott Weiner (who hopes to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress), pushed for a ban on federal agents wearing masks, which has since been blocked in the courts—though it may eventually be replaced by a ban that can withstand scrutiny.⁷⁴ In October California Dems like Bass and US House Oversight Committee Robert Garcia took the ongoing racial profiling, and especially the arrests of US citizens, as a wedge to push for Congressional investigations into DHS.⁷⁵ Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta would pursue this line, later in the year, inviting the public to submit evidence of illegal federal agent conduct to a new online portal.⁷⁶ Largely this civil rights-based strategy, with the temporary exception of impeded racial profiling, has been too little, too late, in the face of the expanded deportation machine.

Still, Angelenos demonstrated that it’s possible to fight back against a DHS surge, gave many examples of how, and showed that doing so could be popular across the working class. All told, more than 14,000 immigrants were arrested by ICE in the Los Angeles area in 2025 (not including those by CBP and others), with more than 1,000 arrests each month after June, often more than 1,500, and with 2,500 arrests in June itself.⁷⁷ Almost 120 people received federal charges for anti-DHS militancy in Southern California, with more than a third of cases failing, some by jury acquittal. Federal prosecutors won convictions in a quarter of cases, though many were misdemeanor pleas. The remainder were pending as of mid-April.⁷⁸

Even with sweeps still less common in August, a report in CalMatters described the texture of Los Angeles in the wake as one of absence, closed restaurants and taco stands, empty city parks and bus seats.⁷⁹ Many immigrants continued to hide and, of course, many had been detained and deported. Calling back to the social disruption of COVID, which caused many households to lose work and become unable to rent, organizers with LATU and the Evict ICE, Not Us Coalition fought Los Angeles county to demand an eviction moratorium, disrupting Board of Supervisors meetings in September. The Board eventually passed, as during COVID, a landlord giveaway to cover for lost rent, protecting only tenants of landlords who apply. Tenants have continued fighting, though with local movement momentum fading the Supervisors have argued for months over compromises.⁸⁰

Chicago

Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago was supposed to be better coordinated and more aggressive than the DHS surge in Los Angeles, where the methods were tested. It's even in the name of the Operation, plus the fact that it got one. It was those things, but also somehow messier, ran about a month longer, and cast the average Chicagoan into even more direct scenes of violence. Whereas LA was ambushed, setting off riots that the administration quickly responded to by deploying the National Guard, Trump warned weeks in advance that Chicagoland would be the next region after DC to expect serious federal presence. On September 6, 2025 two days before the Blitz operations began, around 3,000 Chicagoans marched downtown against the prospect.⁸¹ That day, reports said DHS had brought 300 agents for Midway Blitz.⁸² Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson admonished Trump that if pushed, they would push back.⁸³

The Cities of Angels and Wind are obviously quite distinct places. The perfect grid of the streets of Chicago parallels the separation of the region’s residents; by one assessment, Chicagoland is considered the second most segregated metro in the country.⁸⁴ Home to slightly more immigrants than the US average, less than a fifth of Chicagoans are foreign born and about half of those are non-citizen.⁸⁵ The region has a fairly average racial make-up, though with an eight percent smaller white majority, and, today, Latinx people somewhat outnumbering Black people. White and Asian residents are more college educated than average. The area’s working class polarizes into white credentialed workers and Black and Latinx non-credentialed workers.⁸⁶ Only a third of Chicagoland residents rent their homes (though Chicago itself is renter majority), and among those who do, less than half are burdened by their rent, with Black tenants more burdened by a wide margin.⁸⁷ It is also the third most populated metro, with 9.4 million people, a fact sometimes forgotten by coastal chauvinists.

Though Trump threatened to send the National Guard and the military from the beginning, it was not until a month later, October 7, that hundreds of federalized Guardspeople, from Texas as well as Illinois began to arrive for their prospective deployment. A handful of violent acts by DHS agents, over the course of dirty work much like that in Los Angeles neighborhoods, might stand in for the greater picture of that first month, during which 760 people were arrested by ICE alone.⁸⁸ Mere days into the Operation, officers murdered Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez in the course of attempting to arrest him, after he had dropped his children off at school, in an event similar to the later killing of Renee Good behind the wheel.⁸⁹ A week later DHS, on September 19, with CBP commander-at-large Bovino on scene, fired tear gas for the first time on protesters outside the Broadview Detention Center, with the Reverend David Black getting shot in the head with pepper-balls. On September 30, DHS raided a South Shore apartment complex with 37 residents, alleging that the apartments were filled with Tren de Aragua gang members; later DHS would claim that only two were members (even this is disputed). Reports indicate the landlord had coordinated the arrests, perhaps to illegally evict the tenants.⁹⁰ Finally, on October 4, feds shot Marimar Martinez, who had been tailing DHS agents to warn neighbors that they were sweeping Brighton Park. Martinez survived the shooting to receive federal charges, which were soon dismissed. Spontaneous protests between neighbors and DHS and involving more than 100 people broke out near where Martinez was shot, lasting for hours, with DHS beating protesters, deploying tear gas, and making arrests.⁹¹

The National Guard was never really deployed. As Gov. Pritzker had promised, the state sued to stop the troops. A US District Court issued a temporary restraining order, soon after upheld on federal appeal, finding that a rebellion was not underway in Chicagoland, as federalizing the Guard would require.⁹² Months later, at the end of December, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the federal Guard deployments in Portland and Los Angeles as well as Chicago were not constitutional, and that the administration could only federalize the Guard if martial law had already been imposed.⁹³ (The deployment in DC was exceptional due to the unique control the federal government has over that city.) Reserving the right to invoke the Insurrection Act in the future, the administration sent the Guardspeople home.⁹⁴

Representatives of the liberal order continued contention in other ways as well in early October. Mayor Johnson, a progressive, Black, former teachers union organizer, tried sharpening the sanctuary status of Chicago by banning DHS staging on city property, calling these ICE Free Zones—an approach taken up elsewhere after events peaked in the Twin Cities in January.⁹⁵ In a case initiated by the National Immigration Justice Center and the state branch of the ACLU, a federal judge ruled that ICE arrests without warrants violated a court order from 2018 banning indiscriminate immigration arrests in the region.⁹⁶ Another federal district judge issued a temporary restraining order on the excessive force of feds against protesters and press.⁹⁷ These rules and rulings have been blunted. As for warrants, at least 400 people found by the court to have probably been arrested without them would only be released when cases heard individually proved there was no warrant. A request for release en masse was denied. Regarding the force, DHS agents would continue their violence despite subsequent orders to stop, with a judge finding DHS habitually lied to justify aggression.⁹⁸ Finally, residents of one neighborhood, Little Village, complained the city wasn’t enforcing an ICE Free Zone against DHS in their area. An analyst for the Vera Institute, writing to promote the Zones policy, acknowledged that “they may be more symbolic than impactful” in the face of DHS defiance, and that, in any case, they don’t prohibit the feds from making arrests, particularly those with warrants.⁹⁹

It’s with good reason, then, that—in the sharpest reflection yet on the anti-deportation movement, “Chipocalypse Now”—the Lake Effect Collective trace the shape of these struggles as three-way fight, a schema from militant antifascism. They write, “the question became how best to exploit conflicts between the federal and state governments for revolutionary ends, and win a burgeoning three-cornered fight between us, the layer of the state captured by the right, and the layer of the state retained by liberal Democrats.”¹⁰⁰ Playing a classic theme of left communists, Lake Effect describes the counterinsurgent role of social movement non-profits allied with the Democrats, attempting to “ic[e] autonomous actors out.” In one example (occurring over the summer prior to the surge), groups like Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) and Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) resisted direct efforts to disrupt deportations by arguing it could jeopardize their providing legal aid and services to detained immigrants.¹⁰¹ Thus, when militants picketed and blockaded DHS’s downtown Chicago infrastructure, OCAD and ICIRR ignored the efforts which eventually lead to closing an immigration court. In another case, once the institutional rapid-response networks had been found by responders to not be very rapid, distributing whistle-blowing kits and tactics to warn neighborhoods about DHS in real time made whistling a new “ground floor for mass participation.” Successful whistling called large crowds to surround and distract DHS agents, who might fire tear gas, with the mayhem allowing for an immigrant to escape or be de-arrested. ICIRR and OCAD discouraged physical interventions, arguing they would be used to justify further federal aggression, calling instead for bystanders to, well, stand by documenting the arrest. (Regardless, whistle warning and swarming was, as far as I can tell, a tactical innovation from Chicago.) In a final example of liberal counterinsurgency, from the state now, Gov. Pritzker deployed the State Police to the Broadview Detention Center to handle the protesters, relieving DHS from their post, and allowing them to focus elsewhere, much as LAPD and the National Guard in downtown LA had freed up DHS to operate throughout the cityscape. Even with all this, Lake Effect Collective acknowledge that the liberal faction at times actually impeded the feds.

The Collective notes that, “no large-scale, militant response ever materialized” in Chicago, unlike those opening weeks in Los Angeles. They attribute this to segregation in the region, and especially spatial and social division between Black and Latinx Chicagoans. Even after the apartment raid in the largely Black South Shore neighborhood, the struggle against DHS did not cross the Black/brown color line, since Black US citizens did not feel themselves threatened.¹⁰² These divisions, and the college-educated myopia of organizing in white neighborhoods where many Latinx people work, impeded the implementation of the centro, community defense center, model borrowed from Los Angeles. Still, Lake Effect Collective believes in the premise that building relationships by having a reliable site for coordination and outreach would more likely bridge solidarity among the working class than digitally coordinated rapid response. Relatedly, Operation Midway Blitz had the effect of winning greater support for local police and politicians, as Lake Effect writes. The three-way fight and mass, multi-racial working-class militance must then go together, as the George Floyd Rebellion against first the police and then the feds proved. In Chicagoland, the level of conflict with local and state police remained mild compared to the fight against Midway Blitz, and the liberals held on to hegemony.

 

No Kings

With the exception of the ultimately stagnant protests at Broadview, which drew from across the resistance spectrum, militance in Chicago, like in LA, was dispersed in countless smaller acts of community defense. In contrast, liberal mass action assembled all at once on October 18 for the nationwide No Kings rally. An estimated 250,000 marched in Chicago, with as many as seven million people joining more than 2,700 events around the country, making it arguably the largest single day mobilization in US history.¹⁰³ This turnout built on the 5 million people and 2,100 events from June’s No Kings 1.¹⁰⁴ Held together by the name, No Kings, a shared principle of opposing Trump’s rising tyranny, initiated by the progressive non-profit Indivisible, partnering with groups like ACLU, Move On, and SEUI, among many others, No Kings represents something like an inside/outside approach to liberal antifascism, a popular front minus communists. No Kings walks a line vaguely left of the Democratic establishment, featuring Bernie Sanders at the DC rally, while including both Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson behind the podium in Chicago. Drawing on the research of political scientist Erica Chenoweth, the No Kings coalition set a goal of eventually turning out 12 million people nationally, believing that historically 3.5 percent of a population hitting the streets nonviolently has broken authoritarian regimes.¹⁰⁵ In polls conducted around No Kings 1 (recall, this was a week or so after the Los Angeles havoc began), immigration was cited as the second leading issue for participants, with vague “politics” and much clearer “income inequality” and “racial justice” reasons trailing roughly tied for third place.¹⁰⁶ The typical participant of these rallies has been a college-educated, middle-aged white woman. As No Kings rallies have grown, so has the median age participant, from 36 in June to 44 in October, up to 48 at March 2026’s No Kings 3 (where the war against Iran might have moved turn-out).¹⁰⁷

A foolish New York Times op-ed chalked the aging participants up to young people’s chatbot and social media habits. This just inverts the cliche that the movements of 2010s rose because of social media. Instead, maybe Zoomers and Millenials just feel they have better things to do. Younger people outraged by mass deportations, austerity, war, and inflation began mobilizing earlier in the cycle—many have been involved continuously since October 7th, 2023—and, particularly in cities, have other political outlets for their anger, some of which I’ve been discussing. Older people, on the other hand, are progressively, if belatedly, turning to the resistance cause and with fewer alternative options than commuting from suburbs to join what some younger people see as enormous but only symbolic rallies. To the credit of No Kings organizers, the-rally-that-goes-nowhere critique is well known, leading them to experiment with connecting participants in October and since to local organizing on the ground.¹⁰⁸ Reciprocally, grassroots and left organizers have noted the No Kings phenomenon and attended to connect with the maddened millions. In any case, according to data collected by the Crowd Counting Consortium, protests and direct actions in general, and around immigration in particular, have significantly risen since Trump returned to office, with a lower plateau in the first half of the year, a higher one after the June events in Los Angeles, and far higher again since Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities.¹⁰⁹ The anti-deportation movement has achieved a unique popularity as part of a broader antifascist front and No Kings is undoubtedly part of that.

 

Minneapolis

Cut through by the Mississippi River, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, the Twin Cities, is both known for the walkability of its urbs and the residential sparsity of its suburbs, with 3.7 million people clustered and scattered throughout. Immigrants live there at a rate much below US average, with eleven percent born in another country, and about half of those non-citizens.¹¹⁰ The populace are also more than three-quarters white, fifteen percent above US average, with below average Black and mixed-race populations, and a very low Latinx population of five percent. A slight minority of white people have college degrees, though still ten percent more than average are credentialed. In fact, Twin Cities residents across race are generally more credentialled than average.¹¹¹ The Twin Cities is also only moderately segregated.¹¹² Nonetheless, though just thirty percent of Twin Cities metro residents are tenants (like Chicago, tenants are a minority in the suburbs, but a majority in the cities proper), forty-seven percent of them are rent burdened, with Black and Latinx tenants both more burdened than white tenants by about ten percent.¹¹³ The class sketch therefore splits between credentialed and non-credentialed white workers, with a small but poor Black and brown working class.

At full rollout, 3,000 DHS officers terrorized the Twin Cities with Operation Metro Surge, the largest ever DHS immigration enforcement operation.¹¹⁴ Assuming the rationality of the paramilitary-based immigration deterrence strategy, flooding the Twin Cities with thousands more kidnappers than the far more immigrant-populated metros of Chicago and Los Angeles might appear uniquely excessive and unreasonable. One explanation is that Trump and the administration sought to humiliate Gov. Waltz and the Minnesota liberal establishment. This is surely true, but it is hard to believe the administration sought to mortify Minnesota more than Illinois or California; though the Twin Cities have some sanctuary policies, they are considered weaker than LA and Chicago.¹¹⁵

This rationale is buttressed by another, a conspiracy theory cited by the administration, that so-called “illegal” Somali immigrants were defrauding the federal government and delivering the proceeds to Islamist militants in Somalia. Based on a case where federal prosecutors had charged nearly eighty mostly Somali people with pandemic relief fraud, the rest of the story is a lie told to portray Somalis as criminals, in keeping with the typical storytelling of crime panics in the era of homeland empire. The fraud-charged Somalis are US citizens.¹¹⁶ Ignoring the fact that the plurality of Twin Cities’ immigrants are from Latin America, fixating on a local Black, supposedly criminal, immigrant population and then delivering extraordinary violence seems eminently plausible.

A third account, offered by Walz himself, is that the administration was disappointed with the results of their prior DHS operations, so they picked a target they assumed to be weaker, and delivered forces calibrated to crush.¹¹⁷ My own contribution complements Walz’s, that with the Supreme Court having ruled that the National Guard would be out of the question, short of insurrection, the administration wanted to put enough paramilitary boots on the ground to more than make up for the shortage of military footwear. Finally, it has been often repeated that the purpose of these surges is to provoke riots, which then justify martial law; to do so in the Twin Cities, whose 2020 militance had set off the events leading to Trump’s electoral defeat, and to do so right after the high court had raised the bar on Guard deployments, reads like the White House’s genre of poetic justice.

Regardless, Metro Surge officially began December 1, with about one-hundred agents deployed, more than doubling the standing regional force.¹¹⁸ At a press conference responding the next day local officials marked the now established liberal line: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey expressed concerns about racially-profiled arrests and the Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara called for protests to remain nonviolent in the name of public safety. By December 10, at least two US citizens had been arrested by DHS, one racially profiled, while the other had been documenting arrests, leading Gov. Walz to write a letter to Sec. Noem on the need for due process. The first, a man going by Mushabir, was chased and tackled, despite having shown his ID.¹¹⁹ The second, Susan Tincher, was recording the arrest of a neighbor from a distance, having been woken to rapid response alerts for her area.¹²⁰ On behalf of Tincher and several similar cases, Minnesota’s ACLU sued DHS for civil rights violations. Fear of DHS raids spread through immigrant communities, leading to reports of business closures and many workers, including US citizens and permanent residents afraid of racial profiling, staying home from work.¹²¹

The mad cabaret didn’t start properly, however, until the arrival of the master of ceremonies, Commander Bovino, coming from a surge in New Orleans.¹²² On January 6 he brought with him 2,000 gestapo.¹²³ A day later, Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, a firearms instructor, for patrolling and impeding the traffic of DHS. Noem and Miller would later accuse Good of domestic terrorism for allegedly trying to hit Ross with her car, a lie disproven by video analysis.¹²⁴ Enraged neighbors rallied to the scene, seeking to block the feds’ cars as they tried to escape, so DHS fired tear gas to disperse them. Minneapolis PD cleared the street, leading to a heated exchange with the protesters. In the week following, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued federally to end the Operation. Then, on June 14, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis was shot by DHS in the leg as he ran towards a house following agents chasing his roommate Alfredo Aljorna by car, again drawing neighborhood protesters. A couple hundred protesters assembled, throwing pieces of ice at the DHS, who shot the crowd with rubber-bullets. When the feds and local police had left the scene, militants looted left behind DHS vehicles.¹²⁵

The exhibited violence—the boot count, the shootings—provoked not just dread but popular rage, inciting truly mass participation in the anti-deportation movement, with tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents joining rapid response networks and neighborhood patrols.¹²⁶ Tensions strained further between layers of government, as the feds blocked Minnesota state investigators from scrutinizing Good’s murder.¹²⁷ A group of US House Democratic Representatives, including progressive Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis, came to inspect the ICE facility at the Whipple Federal Building, but were blocked, leading to a US District Court fight that tentatively affirmed the Reps’ oversight. Throwing bad resources after bad, DHS sent another 1,000 agents in mid-January. In one show of cruelty, agents detained a five-year-old coming from school, Liam Conejo Ramos, to use him as bait to arrest his father.¹²⁸

Two weeks after Good’s death, as many as 75,000 people marched in far below freezing temperatures demanding “ICE Out of Minnesota” for a “Day of Truth and Freedom” on the afternoon of Friday January 23. Conveners called the action an economic blackout, issuing the slogan “No Work, No School, No Shopping,” leading some to call it a general strike. A shaggy estimate puts statewide participation in the labor shutdown at 4.75 percent of all voters, with somewhat greater turnout by credentialed workers.¹²⁹ School districts throughout the state reported closing due to the cold, with many teachers having called in sick.¹³⁰ Throughout the week preceding, many students walked out. About 1,000 businesses closed, with 700 publicizing their closure. That morning about one-hundred clergy blocked traffic at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport, a transit hub for the deportations.¹³¹ They deliberately sought arrest in a classic civil disobedience action. The next day a group of DHS agents killed Alex Pretti, who had been recording them and carried a licensed, holstered firearm. In the aftermath, hundreds of protesters struggled at the scene with law enforcement and over one-hundred feds. Administration leadership repeated the lie that the murdered person, Pretti, was a domestic terrorist, again initially blocking state investigators. Likely the final stroke, on January 25, the state Chamber of Commerce released a letter signed by sixty CEOs of Minnesota-based corporations, “calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.”¹³² Though equivocal, with this letter a significant bloc of capitalists finally broke the class’s silence regarding deportations. That night a noise demonstration outside a Hilton hotel housing DHS agents escalated into militants breaking and spray-painting windows with the feds trading back tear gas and flash-bangs. By Monday the 26, the accumulated pressure had forced Trump to reconsider the administration's approach, disavowing the “domestic terrorist” allegation and agreeing to work with Walz, with border czar Tom Homan as his emissary.

Heat remained high in the frozen streets of the Twin Cities for the following weeks, while Tom Homan negotiated the wind down of Operation Metro Surge, with Bovino eventually forced into retirement and Noem removed from DHS. In the end, Walz affirmed to Homan what had always been true, that DHS could detain immigrants from the state’s jails and prisons as long as this didn’t require illegally extending their time in Minnesota’s custody, while Homan promised to withdraw Metro Surge. In the end, despite thousands more agents present in those months in the Twin Cities, the monthly total immigrants arrested by ICE alone followed a similar pattern and within similar range to Chicago and Los Angeles, rising to more than 800 in December, spiking to almost 2,400 in January, before dropping to about 560 in February. Of those arrested, about only about 100 were from Somalia, with almost half of the immigrants arrested coming from Ecuador or Mexico.¹³³

 

Defeating Homeland Security

Distilled, there are two competing explanations of how the White House was forced to end Operation Metro Surge. One, commonly referenced in both mainstream and social-democratic media, told by Democratic politicians, nonprofit staffers, and union officials, claims that regular Minnesotans showed incredible courage and discipline by practicing nonviolent civil resistance in their neighborhoods, in targeted direct actions, and at mass events like the “Day of Truth and Freedom” in unprecedented numbers, without “taking the bait” and engaging in political violence. Within this faction, there are those that credit and those that critique the contributions of the Governor, state AG, Mayors, and so on. For them, the key event was the economic blackout, and the threat that it could be repeated after Pretti was killed. They attribute the scale of this day primarily to turning out the durable constituencies of their unions and organizations, to the new constituencies represented by the figure of the “constitutional observer” of whom reportedly thousands had been trained, and to the years of coalition building that gave them confidence that they could meaningfully pull off the blackout if called. They acknowledge also the widespread self-organization exhibited by the neighborhood rapid response networks, among other forms, as a contributing factor. The high voter engagement of Minnesotans would be a signal, saturated fact here.¹³⁴

Another view, in the anarchist and anti-state communist media, attributes everything more or less to the rapid response networks. These networks coordinated, in many cases on a block-by-block level since such high numbers of Twin Cities residents joined them, not only thorough evidence of DHS violence by trained “constitutional observers” but for a wide spectrum of interventions including verbally harassing feds, physically blocking and releasing immigrants from arrest, throwing rocks, snowballs, and DHS’s own tear gas cans, as well as vandalizing DHS vehicles. (Organized hyperlocally, the networks incorporated mutual aid and other functions, similar to the centros of LA and Chicago.) The argument continues, that this tactically diverse resistance, incited by DHS’s violence, incited further DHS violence in turn, including rubber bullets and tear gas, and ultimately two killings of observers and one shooting of an immigrant, which then provoked even more intense and frequent resistance, of which the large days of action like January 23 are part, as were the looting of the DHS cars on January 14 and the noise demo of January 25. All of this adds up, in one telling, to “a slowly-evolving insurgency,” which flows throughout the cities like water, chasing the feds who have also learned to flow, as the cliche goes, like ICE melted by the heat. Here the liberal and left establishment are seen contributing to these developments not as participants, nor merely as obstacles, but—due to the purportedly merely symbolic nature of the establishment’s actions—by unleashing people to militancy by offering nothing real.¹³⁵

The insurgency story has the advantage of validation by facts that discredit disciplined civil resistance; analysis by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) indicates that in the first three weeks of January, before Alex Pretti was killed, thirty percent of anti-deportation protests of all sizes in Minnesota involved “physical confrontation” between protesters and law enforcement. This was a huge step from eighteen percent in Illinois during Operation Midway Blitz, and a surprisingly low ten percent in California during the Los Angeles operation.¹³⁶ In all but 1–2 percent of these confrontations protesters took the initiative, with the remainder being excessive force by law enforcement. In an atmosphere of direct action far heavier than Chicago and Los Angeles, nearly one third of all events involving protester-driven interventions makes it impossible to call this movement nonviolent. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that more nonviolent direct action occurred in the Twin Cities than had happened anywhere else, and that a number of key actions had particularly significant impact. Tragically, the assertive patrolling by Renée Good and constitutional observation by Alex Pretti, which DHS agents responded to by killing them, turned Good and Pretti into martyrs and released righteous anger, intensifying the movement. The Day of Truth and Freedom, a mass strike though not a truly general strike, represented the first large-scale, coordinated labor action in the movement up to this point, introducing a qualitatively different day of action than, say, No Kings. This catalyzed widespread business closures in a situation where many businesses were already closed due to immigrant labor shortages.

These competing stories are each myopic, calling us to look beyond them. The violence/nonviolence binary is a myth; the truth is mass disruption of all kinds. The Trump administration was disappointed with the results of previous operations and by being blocked by the courts from federalizing the National Guard, and, driven by/with the alibi of a racist xenophobic fraud panic, launched an unprecedentedly large and forceful Operation Metro Surge, which in turn provoked an unprecedentedly large and tactically varied anti-deportation movement, resulting in a dialectic of mutual provocation and escalation. The Twin Cities brought to a pinnacle the movement catalyzed in Los Angeles, where a tactical repertoire had coalesced, and then refined in Chicago. This includes most notably autonomous rapid response networks, neighborhood patrols, whistle swarming, de-arrests, mutual aid, and noise demonstrations. This pinnacle drew also on preexisting progressive and working-class organizations as well as the cultural memory of the 2020 rebellion. With DHS roaming everywhere and with immigrants a proportionately smaller population, living and working in a comparatively less segregated environment, more working-class citizens, credentialed and not, and particularly white people (given the demographics), observed, organized, and intervened against DHS arrests and violence. The series of three tragic shootings in almost two weeks, resulting from and further escalating the preceding context, provoked indignation, not only on behalf of immigrant neighbors but in response to a threat now felt directly by about four percent of the local population, those involved in networks, and felt peripherally by all. From this came the mass strike, followed by the Chamber of Commerce letter, and the beginning of the end, and then the end of Operation Metro Surge.

War of Attrition

As others have remarked, it’s one thing for US voters to support mass deportation for so-called criminal immigrants in the abstract, and it's another for them to support a roving paramilitary, breaking through home doors and car windows, using children as bait, etc. to arrest neighbors, without warrants, and beating up anyone who asks questions. A Scripps poll in September 2024 counted support for mass deportations at fifty-four percent of all voters, including a majority of independents and a quarter of Democrats.¹³⁷ That month, Civiqs estimated that nineteen percent wanted to abolish ICE.¹³⁸ Polled opinion has now essentially inverted—with half of voters supporting abolishing ICE, including almost a quarter of Republicans in early March of this year;¹³⁹ in February, Reuters/Ipsos estimated only thirty-eight percent supported the deportations.¹⁴⁰ It is not merely the reality of deportations but a mass movement against them which, momentarily, formed majority support for abolishing them.

Ever chasing public opinion, Congressional Democrats blocked funding for DHS for months, leading to a department shutdown, demanding a package of reforms to immigration that nobody in the movement asked for, including judicial warrants for home entry, body cameras, a mask ban, and changes to various tactics, including collateral arrests and use-of-force. While Democrats learned their lesson from the previous shutdown in 2025—to not give up before your demands are met—Republicans have learned too; most of DHS has now been funded after carving CBP and ICE out from the bill, with Republicans seeking to fund them separately through budget reconciliation, bypassing Democrats.¹⁴¹ Legislatively impossible, abolishing ICE has nonetheless again entered the lexicon of Congress, where it had been little heard since 2018. To pick a couple examples, Rep. Analilia Mejia, who recently won in a New Jersey special election, and who advocates abolition, has now been appointed to the relevant House committee;¹⁴² Chicago’s House Rep. Delia C. Ramirez has even called for abolishing DHS as a whole.¹⁴³ An opening has widened for progressive and social-democratic politicians inspired by Zohran Mamdani, who incorporate opposition to Zionism and deportations into their platform against oligarchy.

If the spectacular paramilitary operations are over for now, as Noem’s replacement for Secretary of DHS Markwayne Mullin has indicated, this by no means translates to an end of the war on immigrants. The updated deportation strategy is to reduce the emphasis on aggressive deterrence back toward the grind of attrition, enacted by the dramatically expanded deportation infrastructure and workforce and supported by still-increasing federal and state bureaucratic hostility to immigrants. A New York Times article on the subject from this April points to new HUD austerity measures, cutting off so-called mixed status households from rent subsidies, attacks on immigrant commercial drivers licenses, and federal pressure on states to cut education funding for young undocumented students.¹⁴⁴ Most consequential along these lines is the pending Supreme Court challenge to the Trump administration’s executive order that would exclude birthright citizenship from the children of undocumented immigrants. The ruling forthcoming in June is widely expected to preserve birthright more or less as is.¹⁴⁵ In terms of deportations, as of this writing, it is too early to judge what the rate of daily arrests will level off toward, though the Times piece cites a recent average of a thousand people a day, in the realm of the Obama’s deporter-in-chief years.

There is no chance, at present, that the anti-deportations movement will halt deportations or abolish ICE. Still, the wave of struggle culminating in the Twin Cities has broadcast the “ICE Out” demands and the movement’s tactical repertoire into even further reaches throughout the country than the initial events in Los Angeles. Rapid response networks have been started in places like Pittsburgh and southern Nevada.¹⁴⁶ Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania has expanded their ICE hotline into a mutual aid support network.¹⁴⁷ In Austin, Texas, residents have demanded local police stop collaborating with deportations.¹⁴⁸ In Florida, a Black socialist group, the Dream Defenders, have begun organizing community spaces and small businesses to act as ICE-Free Zones.¹⁴⁹ The town of Merrimack, New Hampshire was able to block plans to open a new detention center.¹⁵⁰ People in many localities will keep fighting to implement and expand sanctuary policies, as we’ve already seen. At the same time, without federal surges inciting one region after another into intensifying resistance, the movement against deportations is sure to atrophy down to the bones, militant activists and progressive organizations, stronger than they have been in half-decade or more, though for now with diminishing involvement from the uncredentialed working class beyond these milieus. The most promising context for working-class initiative will be by immigrants themselves as more than ever before are interned in detention centers, creating a parallel movement, much as the prison struggles from about 2010 to 2016 ran in parallel to the first wave of Black Lives Matter.¹⁵¹ Reports last August described uprisings against cruel conditions in New Florida’s notorious new center, Alligator Alcatraz.¹⁵² In January, dozens of immigrants in a Texas facility protested for the freedom of Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, as well as their own freedom.

We are now amid a wave of hunger and labor strikes launched by immigrants held in detention centers owned by GEO Group, against harmful conditions and treatment, and demanding release. First reports came in April 22, with hundreds refusing food and work in Baldwin, Michigan and several more hunger striking in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania.¹⁵³ Twenty more immigrants, at least, joined the hunger strike in early May from detention in Adelanto, California.¹⁵⁴ Then, on May 22 around three-hundred more detained immigrants stopped eating and working at Newark, New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, which soon drew crowds protesting outside, and growing clashes between, first, militants and feds, and later between militants and the state police brought in, unsuccessfully, to lower tensions.¹⁵⁵ Unrest inside Delaney Hall, including an escape, and protests outside last June led to Geo Group to relocate immigrants away from the facility.¹⁵⁶ The Newark events are still evolving as of early this June, among the latest news being Mayor Ras Baraka’s announcement of a lawsuit aimed to close the detention center.¹⁵⁷ Perhaps the battles of Delaney Hall will mark a new phase of the movement, uniting anti-deportation struggles inside and outside detention. If so, an opportunity to lead remains with the immigrants inside the camps.

Several linked insights by way of the Lake Effect Collective address a communist agenda as the movement mutates on into the future. The first concerns the question of the three-way fight cited earlier, and the need to leverage the conflict between the MAGA feds and progressive/Democratic local organizations and governments, to advance our revolutionary hopes. In a follow up to the “Chipocalypse” essay, in the wake of Operation Metro Surge, Lake Effect argues that there are no current prospects for revolution coming out of this movement, in essence due to its cross-class, largely white populist character. Putting it more sharply they argue, as did David Feldman regarding the SB1070 struggle, “the anti-ICE struggle in its current form has a stake in the continued exploitation of precarious immigrant labor.” Middle- and ruling-class defectors, who were ultimately integral to the movement’s success in the Twin Cities, frequently employ these workers. But preserving status quo ante class relations would not solve the political and economic stagnation and legitimacy crisis that led MAGA to seek mass deportations in the first place. Here, liberalism and fascism are both dead ends, though that may not prevent history crashing us into them.

Those with revolutionary aspirations have failed, perhaps could not but have failed, to leverage the federal/local conflict. This is not only due to the social composition of the movement. Obviously, the daily experience of the struggle put the fight against DHS at the core, while the fight against the local state forces was only peripheral—most significantly, in the form of occasional physical confrontations with local police on the occasions when they backed up the feds. Had, for example, the local police killed someone in this moment, reality would have posed the problem memorialized in the chant, "La migra, la policía, la misma porquería” (immigration (agents), the police, the same bullshit). Despite the impact of Latinx/Black segregation in Chicagoland for example, discussed earlier, polls have shown that Black Americans have come to oppose the White House’s immigration policy more than any other racialized or ethnic group, extremely concerned by DHS’s violence.¹⁵⁸ Whether by tragedy or some better fortune, the convergence of the two abolitionist mass movements would, and one day might, really bring on the three-way fight. One example of struggle with local forces we have seen in the current wave bears on another abolition, that of rent. The demand to ban evictions due to immigrants losing work has gone furthest in Los Angeles, where the Tenant Union was a key participant in the anti-deportations movement, but has been posed in Chicago and the Twin Cities as well, resulting, in the latter case, in the founding of a new tenant union and an aborted attempt at a mass rent strike for an eviction moratorium.¹⁵⁹ It has been years now since the tenant struggle was, briefly, a mass movement; it will most likely take an economic crisis to revive it. Between the absurdities of the war against Iran and the AI bubble, we may well see one sooner than later. In any case, we are only a year and a half into the Trumpist try at fascism, and we have already racked up a win with scarce precedent. It’s still anybody’s contest in the fight between socialism or barbarism.