After Minneapolis, the administration didn’t retreat from mass deportation. It retreated from being watched.
By Scot Nakagawa
In January, with federal agents flooding Minneapolis and the president’s numbers on immigration sliding, one of his advisers explained the problem to a reporter. “He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing.”
That’s the quiet part, said out loud. It’s also the most accurate description I’ve read of what the administration has done since.
The troops, the convoys and the commander in tactical gear posing for cameras are gone. The arrests are not. July was the biggest month for immigration arrests of this presidency. The noise came down while the numbers went up, and we need to say so loudly, because quiet is exactly what they’re counting on.
The show
For eight months, immigration enforcement was staged as a series of invasions.
- Los Angeles, June 2025. 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines.
- Portland, September 2025. The president ordered troops into my city. The courts blocked him, and none ever reached the streets.
- Chicago, fall 2025. About 4,000 arrests in 68 days. Fifty-nine percent of those arrested had no criminal conviction.
- Charlotte and New Orleans. Border Patrol blitzes with cartoon names. New Orleans produced about 370 arrests against a goal of 5,000.
- Minneapolis, December 2025 to February 2026. About 3,000 agents and roughly 4,000 arrests. Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
The arrests were never the whole point. A city under occupation is a message to every other city. Fear was the product, and the cameras were how it shipped.
What the show cost them
It cost them in every place an authoritarian project needs cooperation.
The courts. Two days before Christmas, the Supreme Court kept the Guard out of Chicago, finding the government had identified no authority to use the military to execute the laws in Illinois. A week later the president withdrew the Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland.
The public. By late January, 65% of Americans said immigration agents had gone too far, up from 54% the previous June. A Fox News poll put disapproval of the agency at a record 60%, with independents moving 13 points.
Bipartisan Resistance. Two Republican senators called for the Homeland Security secretary to go.
Congress. The department’s funding lapsed for 76 days in a fight over reforms. None passed.
The streets. Minneapolis organized block by block, and tens of thousands of people learned to watch, document and refuse.
Then the show closed. The Border Patrol commander who ran it was pulled from Minneapolis and retired. The secretary was fired. Officials told reporters there were “no immediate plans” for more large-scale operations aimed at specific cities. One official put it less politely: “That show is shut down.”
We should call that what it was. Organized, nonviolent, mass non-cooperation raised the price of the spectacle until the administration stopped paying it. That is a win, and people in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland earned it.
It was a win against a tactic. The goal didn’t move.
What replaced it
For a few weeks the numbers did fall. Arrests dropped about 12% after the Minneapolis drawdown.
Then they climbed past where they’d been. Arrests reached 43,138 in June and 49,571 in July, about 1,600 a day and the highest of this presidency. Only 27% of the people arrested in July had a criminal conviction, the lowest share on record. The Marshall Project has a name for it: a shadow surge.
Here is how you run a surge nobody films.
You hand it to local police. In January 2025 there were 135 agreements deputizing local officers for immigration enforcement. By this August there were 2,365, in 39 states. Agencies are paid to sign: $100,000 each, plus $7,500 per officer. The new secretary said it plainly: “I would love to see ICE become a transport more than the front line.”
You work where there are no bystanders. Jails, check-in appointments, traffic stops, parking lots. In Oregon, where the troops never came, agents have been scanning license plates outside big-box stores. Arrests here more than tripledbetween spring and summer.
You hold people where no one can find them. Immigration detainees were held in 469 facilities in July. The agency acknowledges 208. Seven in ten people detained have no criminal conviction. At least 37 people died in custody in the last fiscal year, the most on record.
You change the law so that less of it happens in court. Fast-track deportation without a hearing now applies nationwide. More than 25,000 people have been sent to countries they aren’t from. Nearly four in ten immigration judges have been fired or have quit, and asylum denials hit 94% in June.
You let the data do the hunting. Twenty-seven states handed over records on 15.7 million food assistance recipients. The agency plans to give its face-scanning app to deputized local police.
You go after the people who watch. Of 558 people charged in connection with immigration protests, 191 had their cases dropped, 22 were acquitted and four were convicted at trial. For most of them, the arrest, the mugshot and the legal bill were the punishment. Journalists have been indicted. An app for reporting agent sightings was pulled from the App Store at the attorney general’s demand.
The quiet isn’t settled
I don’t want to overstate this. The administration hasn’t given up the loud option. It’s just put it on a shelf where it can reach it.
- New York got a surge. Agents ran a 33-day operation there from late July to late August, claiming 2,197 arrests. There were no troops.
- The president keeps overruling restraint. In July he reversed his own secretary’s pause on vehicle stops. In late September a directive to prioritize the “worst first” was rescinded within days.
- People are still dying. An agent shot and killed a man in Biddeford, Maine, in July.
- A new surge has been announced. In late September, five weeks before the midterms, the department announced a “nationwide public safety surge” in sanctuary jurisdictions in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Oregon is on the list.
When the president pulled the Guard out last December, he said, “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form.” Take him at his word on both halves. Quiet is now the default, and loud is the threat held in reserve.
Why quiet is harder to fight, and where it’s weak
The spectacle was their mistake. It produced witnesses. Every convoy created a crowd, every crowd had phones, and every video moved somebody to action who’d been sitting it out. The polls, the court rulings and the Republican defections all ran through what people could see.
Quiet enforcement removes the witness. Nobody is standing on the corner when a jail hands someone over at the release desk. A sheriff’s deputy making a traffic stop looks like ordinary policing. A man who goes to his check-in and doesn’t come home is a private catastrophe, with no footage.
It also changes who is doing it. In Minneapolis the agents were outsiders in masks, and a whole city could unite against them. Under the quiet model the arresting officer may be a local deputy, and the cell may be in the county jail. That divides communities that the surges united.
But look at what the quiet model depends on. It runs on local consent. Sheriffs are elected. County commissions vote on the contracts. State legislatures decide whether police may sign them, or must. The $100,000 goes into a budget that someone approves in a public meeting.
The loud model needed nothing from us except submission. The quiet model needs thousands of local officials to say yes, one at a time. That makes this a fight over pillars of support, and it’s a fight we know how to wage.
What to do
The networks built to answer raids have to learn to answer paperwork.
1. Find the agreement. Look up whether your sheriff, police department or state patrol has signed on to do immigration enforcement. The agency publishes the list. If they have, ask who voted for it and what it pays.
2. Make it a ballot question. Many sheriffs, county commissioners and state legislators are on the ballot November 3. Ask each one, in public, whether they’ll sign, renew or end the agreement.
3. Watch the quiet places. Immigration court. Check-in offices. The county jail’s release desk. Court-watch and accompaniment programs put witnesses back where they’ve been removed.
4. Follow the data. Ask your state what it has handed over: benefit records, health records, license records. Ask what it will refuse next time.
5. Count, and publish the count. Local arrest numbers are available from public data projects. Get them to your local paper every month. A shadow surge depends on nobody adding it up.
6. Don’t stand the loud networks down. The rapid-response trees, legal observers and mutual aid that made the surges too expensive are the reason the surges stopped. A new one has been announced. Keep them drilled.
The administration learned something in Minneapolis. It learned that we were watching, and that being watched was costing it a lot. So it moved the work to places where it thought we wouldn’t look.
Our job is to look there, and to say the quiet part out loud.
Scot is co-founder and Co-Director of the 22nd Century Initiative (22CI), a national strategy and action center that is building a movement to resist authoritarianism and preserve the possibility of a more democratic future.
This article was published Oct. 8, 2026, at antiauthoritarianplaybook.