{"id":518819,"date":"2026-01-15T21:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T21:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/518819\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T21:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T21:26:09","slug":"ices-occupations-are-here-what-leaders-do-next-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/518819\/","title":{"rendered":"ICE\u2019s occupations are here. What Leaders do next matters."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been writing about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) in some form or another for nearly a decade. I\u2019ve written about them and their precursors over time, from the genesis of immigration enforcement as a concept<\/a> toward the turn of the last century through myriad evolutions and cycles of shifting national policy in the more recent past. There\u2019s no doubt that these and their predecessors have long been brutal agencies; Border Patrol, to give just one example, was at the forefront of the inhumane Bracero Program and subsequent massive Operation Wetback roundups<\/a>, which resulted in the swift and mostly process-free deportations of hundreds of thousands of largely Mexican laborers, including U.S. citizens, in 1954.<\/p>\n

Yet as aggressive as these operations sometimes were, they were still for the most part focused on actual immigration enforcement, mostly in more rural and agricultural areas, and in ways that did not aim to be particularly visible to the broader public. This is different. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and his men are clearly still executing some immigration warrants, but in the Twin Cities they seem mostly to be acting as an occupying paramilitary, openly profiling people while out on fishing expeditions. They seem to relish confrontation with locals, who they understand that the feds are there to antagonize.<\/p>\n

Law enforcement of any kind is clearly a pretext; that\u2019s not the point of these deployments. I\u2019d be hard-pressed to say whether there even is a specific operational objective for the surge of agents into Minneapolis, or whether there\u2019s more of a political objective. President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seem to want the occupations to break the back of blue-state constituencies and to show political opponents that the administration can do whatever it wants, by force. Their true objective seems to be to destroy the rule of law in the public\u2019s mind, and replace it with a sense of Trump\u2019s utter dominance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What NYC has (and hasn\u2019t) prepared<\/strong><\/p>\n

A few months ago, I wrote about New York City\u2019s preparations (or lack thereof)<\/a> for the eventuality of a mass federal immigration operation here. It seemed to me then that city and state officials were being a little tight-lipped about what if anything was being worked out to counter what seemed like a strong possibility, though City Hall assured me that some plans were in place. A lot has happened since then; DHS has mounted or attempted to mount a couple of sizable raids in NYC, Zohran Mamdani has been elected and inaugurated as mayor (and had a bizarrely friendly meeting<\/a> with Trump), a City Council staffer was detained<\/a> by ICE agents and we\u2019ve seen of ICE\u2019s aggressive surges move into several more states.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard a little more about some planning for the eventuality of their arrival here, but nothing I can as of yet confidently share publicly (there are also rumors about what shape their future deployments may take, but again, those are just rumors). Still, the basic tenets are in my view the same as they were months ago: for good or ill, we live in a federalized system of government where, unlike most other countries, individual states and cities actually have quite a lot of innate power.<\/p>\n

States\u2019 rights have long been coded as a basically right-wing notion, evocative of slavery, Jim Crow, opposition to environmental regulations and so on. But their powers cut both ways. Individual states and cities have, I think, some real if relatively untested authority to stand up against a runaway federal government. A few weeks ago, I wrote for The New Republic<\/a> about some of the legal and practical questions around state and local prosecutors arresting and charging federal agents that had overstepped the scope of their duties. Just a couple of weeks later, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed<\/a> 37-year-old mother Renee Good in Minneapolis in an incident captured on video from multiple angles. Homeland Security and the administration resorted reflexively to lying flagrantly about the exchange, claiming among other things that Good had rammed officers with her car despite clear video evidence that she hadn\u2019t. In short order, multiple federal prosecutors resigned<\/a> both over leadership\u2019s refusal to properly investigate the shooting and the demand that they instead investigate Good herself and her widow. Since Good\u2019s death, multiple ICE agents have been filmed<\/a> explicitly citing her killing while talking to residents and protesters, in what seem like obvious threats.<\/p>\n

Local resistance is making a difference<\/strong><\/p>\n

The main thing that seems to have prevented even more intense disruptions of life under this pseudo-siege of the Twin Cities is the serious, organized resistance<\/a> by ordinary local residents. As we\u2019ve seen in other cities, they\u2019ve been responding quickly to operations, filming them, blowing whistles, patrolling streets and keeping the pressure on federal officials. This has not completely prevented raids and arrests, but it has clearly slowed them down and tied them up in consistent street confrontations. This is the simplest and most consistent lesson that has come out of DHS\u2019s paramilitary occupations: community planning pays off, and organized local pushback does indeed hamper operations.<\/p>\n

Still, it can\u2019t go on like this. In the Twin Cities, in Chicago and, yes, in NYC, I think local officials need to draw very clear red lines and have specific plans for when those lines are crossed. We\u2019re too far into this and the objectives are too clear and predictable for ad-hoc decision making. Local prosecutors should in my view feel empowered to investigate, probe, subpoena and seek arrest warrants for federal officers. So far, officials have relied on litigation like Minnesota\u2019s own litigation against the deployments<\/a> and policymaking like California\u2019s ongoing efforts to ban mask-wearing by federal agents<\/a>. These things can have a positive effect, though they still leave open the question of enforcement; in an environment where the administration has often seemed happy to violate federal court orders and state and national laws, how will they be made to comply? As I wrote in that New Republic piece, there is no blanket immunity for federal agents acting even under supposed color of law, provided that it can be established that they are over-stepping their authority. We have our own local and state police forces, very sizable and well-equipped ones.<\/p>\n

For the most part, local officials have engaged in legal and rhetorical battles with the federal government, but what if they actually deployed state police, say, to trail ICE and intervene in narrow circumstances, such as, for example, agents\u2019 attempts to curtail First Amendment-protected activity? Immigration arrests themselves are more of a gray area, but there\u2019s no question that agents can\u2019t arrest people for protesting or filming them in ways that aren\u2019t clearly interfering with their operations. It seems to me like it should be an obviously legitimate use of state power to ensure constitutional order in their own territories.<\/p>\n

The wrong choice and the difficult right one<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, all this brings me, inexorably, to the big question that has clearly dissuaded mayors and governors from taking these steps, which is \u2013 what happens then? It doesn\u2019t take much extrapolation to realize that by having state agents constrain federal ones, what you\u2019re really setting up is the potential for some exchange of force between them. I think people escalating immediately to the specter of \u201ccivil war\u201d and such are jumping the gun; a huge amount of what the administration has done so far involves clear and obvious steps towards out-and-out authoritarianism, but just because that\u2019s their intent doesn\u2019t mean we are now in a fascist government.<\/p>\n

By the same token, confrontations between centers of power here does not mean that we are suddenly in civil war as if that were a binary state \u2013 either war or not war. Steps to actively constrain ICE and CBP would be taken as an incitement by the feds, though a response by local government to the acute escalation already taking place could also just be called self-defense. Which is really what all this is about: public policy is so often choosing among the best of bad options. If behind door number 1 is \u201clet an authoritarian government steamroll your population into submission while rendering your nonwhite population to detention camps\u201d and behind door number 2 is \u201cstand up to this government and set off potentially significant, potentially violent confrontation\u201d then I have to say I don\u2019t think the obvious choice is number 1.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t say this in some glib or bloodthirsty way, in the way that some people seem to yearn for civil strife, but as a somber representation of the options put before us. I understand that these are things that will have wide-ranging and unpredictable consequences. But I also think each passing day only makes it clearer that there\u2019s a wrong choice here and a very difficult right one. Trump has marched past the Rubicon now, and the real question is whether we\u2019ll let him keep going.<\/p>\n

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