This essay is one in what we hope will be a series, based on our experiences in the Twin Cities, intended to tease out various aspects of the ongoing movement against ICE and the feds; it is by no means comprehensive.
– S. W. & K. S.
During recent visits to the Twin Cities, we witnessed federal occupation and commensurate mass resistance at a scale not yet seen, neither in Chicago during the height of Midway Blitz nor anywhere else in the country thus far. While there were plenty of moments of concentrated federal agents in Chicago, both at Broadview and in neighborhoods including Little Village and Back of the Yards on some days, the saturation was at another level in the Twin Cities; the odds of seeing feds at any given time were simply much higher than they were in Chicago, given the sheer fact that about ten times as many agents were crammed into an area about four times as small. The resistance also scaled up and became denser; no longer the domain of specialists, as has so often been the case in Chicago, thousands of hands reached out to take up the tasks of community defense, whether by searching for and confronting the feds directly, delivering groceries to people staying in their homes, or performing a myriad of other tasks. As two comrades recently put it, “No one person can directly experience the entire scope of this activity.”
Since Alex Pretti’s murder and the initiation of the so-called “drawdown” by the feds, federal presence has gone down substantially; much like in Chicago following Midway Blitz, ICE operations have moved out to the suburbs, and it remains to be seen what will become of the metropolitan anti-ICE infrastructure without as saturated a field — a question, of course, tied up with how local police collaboration with ICE changes. Presently, it seems as though partisans across the country are holding their breath, wondering if they can expect concentrated shows of force in the future at the same scale as in the Twin Cities, and, assuming that they will, waiting, watching, and preparing for the clouds to darken and lightning to strike again.
It remains to be seen whether or not the feds will repeat Operation Metro Surge elsewhere, or whether the once-concentrated mass of agents will become diffuse across the country, raising the tide of the ICE flood in all regions. In either case — and there is no indication they are mutually exclusive possibilities — the blitz and occupation in the Twin Cities portends a sea change in the character of the mass deportation campaign occurring nationally, from the post-9/11 border regime into a revanchist settler facsimile of the old-time law, both nostalgic of the early twentieth-century frontier and more fascistic than it.
The Border Regime’s Historic Functions
Historically, deportations and immigration policies have performed both disciplinary and accumulatory functions, permitting the state to bring in temporary supplies of labor to fill shortages and ease the effects of the capitalist boom and bust cycle, while simultaneously disciplining and shaping this segment of the international working class through the threat and reality of deportations into something both transitory and precarious. Threatened and regularly removed by surges of kidnappings, these select, racialized segments of the working class are thereby forced to accept abject conditions and wages, while maintaining intra-class divisions along the color-line, bearing the worst effects of crises in abjection and isolation so that others can keep a higher standard of living despite said crises.
Following the Reconstruction period, the white power structure was immediately able to maintain the slave power’s capital composition, forcing Black people to continue toiling in southern agricultural industries through the twin forces of debt and terror at the hands of the sharecropping system and the first Ku Klux Klan. However, as industrial capital continued to mature in the U.S., beginning around the turn of the twentieth century and peaking during World War II, the U.S. working class underwent a geographic and economic recomposition into more urban industrial sectors, thereby shifting the labor supply of rural, agricultural labor more towards temporary laborers from Latin America. At the same time, in the Western territories, temporary workers from East Asia and Mexico were increasingly relied on for infrastructural and agricultural industrial development. Into the twenties, white settlers in the Southwestern regions regularly seized land, facing Mexican and indigenous resistance but ultimately proceeding in their removal efforts with the tacit approval of the U.S. government to “Go West.” As large-scale commercial agricultural and mining industries developed in these regions, precarious and temporary migrant labor became more predominant, following a pattern whereby settler terror drove surplus populations to other parts of the U.S. or expelled them from it, after which cyclical acts were undertaken to increase migration and bolster the labor supply, now re-available in the form of “cheap labor” on the other side of the border. From the thirties to the fifties, immigration policies, themselves extensions of Keynesian fiscal policy intended to address labor shortages due to the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II, aimed to bring in millions of workers while ensuring their stays remained temporary, preventing their families from settling, and ultimately removing them, deporting millions in the process.
From 1945 to 1975, following the destruction of the fascist states and the dismantling of European colonial empires, the U.S., with a revitalized wartime economy, a singing international quartet of automobile, oil, steel, and rubber production, and an expansive system of consumer credit, experienced the most sustained and prolific boom in the history of capitalism. Capital has not seen this since, and likely will not see it again; by the late 60s, with an upsurge in domestic and international class struggle and an end to the endless increases in profit, the record started skipping; by the 70s, with stagflation, financial crises, supply chain shocks, and reaction soon to follow, the party was over. The Keynesian financial system, which had delivered the U.S. from the depths of the Depression just forty years earlier, had failed and backfired, leaving state and capital at a joint impasse. Faced with mounting crises and an increasingly dynamic and ambitious working-class movement against the color line and U.S. imperialism, something had to give. It was in the social welfare programs of the Great Society and the New Deal that state and capital found their sin-eaters, and it was in Friedman, Pinochet, Thatcher, and Reagan that they found their hatchet men and women.
In his 1981 inaugural address, Ronald Reagan, his gaze blank and pitiless, uttered: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But neo-liberalism did not shrink the state; it only reconfigured its role in social reproduction to an earlier nineteenth-century form, shifting from a combination of welfare and warfare to a sharply uneven combination of workfare and warfare, subordinating the state and civil society to global capital, and setting the stage for intensified economic nationalism, inter-imperialist rivalry, and intensified population management. As the state stepped away from its previous function of prosocial mediation of social reproduction, public services and social programs were overtaken by private industries and the prison fix, all the while suffused and surrounded by the rapidly growing and persistent militarized policing apparatus and military industrial complex, whose technologies would be developed within urban metropoles, at the border, and abroad. It is not surprising that this is the environment in which Trump came up, coming to see in his own New York City the vision of a crime-hellworld produced by palliative, byproductive reforms granted to people of color in the course of their struggles for freedom. Nearly forty years later, beginning with the lightning expansion of the deportation machine and the attack on sanctuary cities, this deep white phantasy is completing politically what once was enacted economically, aimed against the liberal state itself and the conditions of class struggle it has historically represented and guaranteed.
The Present Day Remodel
While labor discipline — in the form of maintaining precarious, temporary labor — has long been a function of deportations, the role of deportation infrastructure has shifted in relation to the War on Terror and post-War on Terror defense industry, the growth of transnational capital around tech, A.I., and surveillance, and these expansions’ internal and external policing functions. The expansion of surveillance and defense infrastructure after 9/11 was also accompanied by a corresponding buildup of deportation infrastructure — ICE itself was created in 2003 — as well as the deputization of local law enforcement to participate in deportation efforts, and the development of 287(g) agreements and other such deals for collaboration with local governments, jails, and prisons.
As tension grows between the political interests of the American racial state and the economic interests of certain sectors of U.S. and transnational capital, the investment in expansive border militarization, A.I. surveillance, and for-profit detention centers — a massively growing complex in which the prison industry companies CoreCivic and GEO Group are the leading players — plays multiple roles. This investment provides good returns to some segments of the transnational capitalist class, concentrated in defense, tech, detention, logistics and transportation, and, shockingly, Financial Investment and Real Estate (FIRE), some of whose representatives have changed their tunes in recent years — as well as their domestic mirror images, and the representatives of each within the U.S. government, while also providing the state with new methods of population control to maintain bourgeois standards of living in the face of rising crises, labor market shortages, automation, and global immiseration.
While the profits of state investment in transnational defense, tech, and detention industries will not trickle down or even sway in front of the U.S. working class, which will continue to be depressed downward, or the domestic industries that rely on immigrant workers, which will suffer from labor shortages, both private and state profiteers stand to gain substantially by investing in industries that repress the attendant crises. On the other hand, the Democrats, having by-and-large lost the support of transnational capital amid waning neo-liberal governance, are as adrift economically as they are politically, unable to offer anything beyond hollow references to a status quo that is not coming back.
From January to October 2025, deportations have ballooned across the country, with arrests doubling or near-doubling across states on average. While we initially hypothesized that a geographic pattern might emerge in this data based on whether the population of unauthorized immigrants in any given area is determined by capital to be surplus to labor, or instead constitutes a sizable percentage of the total labor supply itself, no clear pattern has emerged. Recent deportation numbers and geographic distribution exceed traditional profit motives for managing surplus populations and forcing acquiescence to wages and conditions.
This is not to say there is no geographic distinction. In the sparser Western states, the percentage of arrests from local jails, prisons, and lockups is particularly high. However, the overall population in these states is low, and unauthorized immigrants generally do not constitute a significant part of the total labor supply. In coastal states with sanctuary policies and high unauthorized immigrant populations, like California or New York, a very low proportion of people kidnapped were taken from jails and lockups. On the other hand, in states with particularly fascistic governments like Florida, over sixty percent of arrests were from lock-ups, due to local cooperation and deputization deals. In states close to the US-Mexico border, excepting California, about fifty to sixty percent of arrests by ICE and CBP are from local jails, prisons, and lockups. In these states, local cooperation and the persistence of Customs and Border Patrol ensure a permanent low-level surge; even despite this, deportations have increased dramatically since 2024. In these states with high lockup arrests, unauthorized migrant workers tend to make up about ten percent of the labor force, concentrated in agriculture, construction, and the service industry. The jail and prison arrests through local cooperation constitute the kidnapping and disappearance of “surplus” populations, a border fix to the prison fix, but the deportation numbers in places like Texas have simply far exceeded the profit rationale.
Similarly, California has a long history of enacting policies to bring in temporary workers and then conducting mass deportations to remove them, as mechanization and automation replaced certain kinds of manual labor and left people jobless. But while industries there could metabolize the kidnapping of large numbers of people due to the state’s large population of unauthorized immigrants, the current level of deportations and accompanying terror that has led many to shelter at home does not cohere with those rationales. In California’s agricultural industry, targeted people are not surplus populations, deemed no longer necessary and therefore removable. To the contrary, there are not enough farm workers, and positions remain unfilled despite rising food costs. While the feds have appeared at times more conscious of the effects of their actions on pertinent industries, backing off from agricultural workplace raids and briefly pausing targeting hotel, restaurant, and agribusiness workers during the Summer of 2025, Trump’s attempts to walk back raids that threaten industry have been contradicted by ICE, with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller swiftly calling off the Summer pause. While conditions created by the gutting of social services, food stamps, unemployment benefits, and labor protections could force “citizen” workers to take on these jobs, that hasn’t yet materialized. There is no way for the state to manage the crisis it is creating.
The Border is Everywhere
The focus on Democrat-run sanctuary cities like Minneapolis–Saint Paul and Chicago is not based on a statistical rationale or maximization of deportation numbers. Nor is the focus on Democratic cities based on avoiding Trump-friendly geographic areas with high concentrations of industries that rely on unauthorized workers, given the dramatic increases in deportations in Texas and Florida. At the same time, the operations conducted by locally-based border agents and agent-surrogate local police differ from the spectacular ICE and CBP activity seen in Los Angeles, Chicago, and, now — at a much higher level of saturation — in the Twin Cities.
While border czar Tom Homan talks about the “win” of obtaining collaboration agreements from Minnesota, it remains unclear to what extent collaboration has increased. Local police involvement in repressive activity against rapid response, filter blockades, and noise demonstrations has certainly increased since the murder of Alex Pretti. But when it comes to lock-ups, many Minnesota counties already had agreements to hand people over to ICE, and those without those agreements, like Hennepin County, insist they have not changed their policies. While the extent of the capitulation remains to be seen, the transformation of sanctuary cities into “border towns” via federal occupation accomplishes what, in other parts of the country, is done by deputized cops and sheriffs without them. Democratic Party local governments seek a return to management of crises, and as such oppose this administration’s exterminationism, but align with its longstanding, less spectacular form. After all, the buildup of ICE, CBP, and general deportation infrastructure has continued after 9/11 under both Republican and Democratic administrations, expanded and maintained by Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. But the Trump administration sending large numbers of militarized federal agents to heavily populated cities in the interior — rather than the border — has resulted in a new form of spectacular terror and has given free rein to the state’s increasingly autonomous and ideologically exterminationist paramilitary forces.
Forty years ago, the state and capital destroyed and remodelled what remained of the welfare state through neo-liberal economic shock therapy; now, forty years later, the state and capital are attempting to do the same to what remains of the liberal state through neo-fascist shock therapy in the realm of the political. Across the country, but especially in the cities and states deemed political enemies to the project of state fascization, what is being asked for and acquiesced to is a political show of fealty from the liberal democratic wing of the ruling bloc, coupled with a real on-the-ground saturation of terror intended to intimidate the population into acceptance of antisocial conditions. The threats and public displays of terror against immigrants and those resisting fascist repression are to be felt, observed, heard, and seen by you in the street, on the T.V., over the radio, and on social media, until one day when you might find yourself in the foreground or the background of a 9:16 propaganda reel, or staring at your own mugshot on the ICE Instagram page. And it does not matter to the feds that in Minnesota, a Democrat stronghold that does not have a particularly high proportion of unauthorized immigrants to the total population, most county jails already collaborate with ICE; what matters is that collaboration is agreed to and accepted out loud as a now-satisfied condition of the “drawdown,” in effect, that the liberal wing says its lines and makes a performance out of the art of the deal. The capitulation of the Italian liberals to Mussolini comes to mind, as described by Gilles Dauve in When Insurrections Die:
The liberals – the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism – joined the government. With the exception of the socialists and the communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist MPs, supported Mussolini’s investiture 306-116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had been head of state many times before the war, and then again in 1920-21, whom fashionable thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. Democracy not only surrendered its powers to the dictator, but ratified them.
What is being accomplished by this terror? At one end, the feds’ activities are intended to disintegrate the most precarious sections of the population. On the other hand, they are an attempt to force the less precarious sections of the working class to accept a U.S. cross-class folk community, united under the name of the nation and enforced in all places by the feds themselves or local law enforcement acting on their behalf until citizens can be trained to enforce it themselves. In ICE-and-CBP-fascism, there appears a vision of the past in the future; what is occurring is fundamentally an institutionalized repeat of the terror-driven accumulation by dispossession that U.S. frontiersmen enacted by driving surplus populations around or out of the country, before the state re-admitted them through its border policies, now transformed into a precarious migrant proletarian fraction. It is not coincidental, then, that in this present crisis, the state has altered the federal H-2A visa program to allow capitalists to lower wages below the legal minimum and skimp on providing housing for migrant workers.
The current deportation surge, with its corresponding growth of the defense and prison industries, appears as a means of fascist state construction and primitive accumulation through population management. Combining the Rittenhouses of the country with an inward-facing national-security blob, the fascist-captured layers of the state concentrated around the executive clearly possess in ICE and CBP a politically autonomous military force akin to the brownshirts and blackshirts, with funding, equipment, and reach surpassing both. And the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. ICE and CBP unions have grown as a political force — albeit with inter-agency friction — from 2008 onwards: calling deportations insufficient despite record numbers under Obama; endorsing Trump but criticizing him for not going far enough; moving towards increasingly rogue actions and explicit undermining under Biden. ICE and CBP forces may act as Trump’s army for now, but they will hardly relinquish their long-awaited license to terrorize. It was tough enough for Trump to get the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” or the January 6th putschists to go home; there is no indication it would be any easier to get ICE and CBP to do the same, whether they continue as official agents of the state or not. Even if the surge model of immigration enforcement were to end, there should be no doubt that the flood of agents will continue nationally, with such proliferation’s palpable result being that every struggle anywhere, whatever its object, will become, at least in part, a struggle against ICE.
Almost two years after his presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric that “every town is now a border town” is actualized in his administration’s policy: pursuing saturation of agents and agent-like law enforcement collaborators across the U.S., including through the opening up and destruction of “sanctuary cities,” bringing the crisis home in every part of the country. At the same time, through the current “tour of duty” model of hopping from city to city, the sharpest moments of the ongoing crisis are being separated by time and space, connecting areas in their reactive resistance to ICE and CBP while preventing the war from being brought home in every city at all times, save through the subjective will of partisan participants.
In Chicago, with some exceptional moments, the struggle against ICE was largely geographically circumscribed and engaged a smaller proportion of the total population, in no small part because the feds conducted in miniature what they are doing nationally; that is, cycling through the neighborhoods of the city while concentrating most sharply in one area in particular, the Southwest side. As a result, many residents simply did not have to face the situation with sober senses as they were forced to in the Twin Cities. And likewise, since the end of Operation Midway Blitz, though ICE has remained, practical opportunities to encounter and resist the feds have decreased, and the infrastructure developed at the height of Midway Blitz has, by and large, quieted down. If Midway Blitz demonstrated one dynamic of the ongoing struggle, Metro Surge demonstrated another; in the Twin Cities, it was the total saturation of the metropolitan area itself, and all the effects of that saturation, that made it impossible for people to turn away from the crisis and spurred them to resist in mass.
As the drawdown in the Twin Cities reaches a thousand agents — still more than the height of Midway Blitz in Chicago — the spectacular terror of the Bovino-CBP faction appears to be supplanted for now by the insidious fast-moving Homan approach: concentrated in the suburbs and far less visible to those not targeted, thereby re-enabling many people to abstract away the continued crisis and challenging the currently predominant rapid response tactics, which will now face many of the same limitations we observed with car patrols in Chicago. If this tactical shift persists, it is unclear but improbable that the precise combination of circumstances that enabled mass resistance in the Twin Cities will emerge elsewhere, even if another city becomes the target of a surge. However, geographically concentrated areas of rupture remain probable as crises and occupation continue to intensify nationwide.
In the current configuration of social conflict, wherein the tide of the ICE flood is rising in all locations but its sharpest moments are geographically separated, partisans face a dilemma. While a national phenomenon comparable to Metro Surge, where every city faces a comparable level of saturation, feels unlikely at this point, there is a hidden risk that this national saturation will emerge far more gradually. As ICE and CBP activity rises across the board, coordinating and strategizing mass resistance beyond individual cities facing the brunt of the pressure seems necessary to ward off the risk of gradual normalization of increased pressure from the boot. But if the current dynamic continues, where federal occupation can be abstracted away by those not immediately encountering its sharpest edges, the odds of the anti-ICE struggle gaining a mass character in every city, including those that, for the time being, are experiencing a more gradual surge, seem slim.
In the present moment, the organic effect of ICE’s activity, namely, focusing struggle into discrete locations, risks negatively impacting coordinated action, and calls for a more expansive approach. What is required is the national development of a political capacity for solidarity, where “an injury to one is an injury to all” is realized, making the sharpest moments of encounter with ICE felt across the country and responded to in practice, either against the feds themselves, collaborator cops or companies, or some combination thereof. This resistance could occur synthetically, but it is more likely that it occurs as a result of the previously mentioned rising tide in federal activity nationwide; contrary to the popular metaphor used to describe fascization, modern experimentation tells us that if a frog is being gradually boiled in a pot, “if the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.”
In June 2025, this national solidarity phenomenon could be observed across the country as cities erupted in response to the feds’ terror in Los Angeles; in the Twin Cities, it has taken a different form, with people traveling to support anti-ICE efforts directly and establishing a momentary municipal concentration. Surges of resistance must become possible in any location experiencing full-scale federal occupation, and in every other location experiencing a gradually-increasing low-to-mid-level surge as well, which, as established, either already includes or will soon include most of the well-populated areas of the country.
To achieve the level of national communication and coordination between participants in the anti-ICE movement required to pull such moves off, it seems obvious that a strong foundation in regional and municipal communication and coordination is required first to even get off the ground, and that in each region, ultras must work to find ways “to test our hypotheses that take hunger and captivity… as their motivating force.” An effective revolutionary struggle against the government and the economy in this country would require a level of national, regional, and municipal saturation matching, and ultimately exceeding, that of the feds and the police; that much is clear. However, the specific steps to develop this remain works in progress, largely dependent on the particular conditions in each city and region, and the changing conditions in the country at large. For the time being, but hopefully not for long, we return to the words of Deng Xiaoping: our basic goal is correct, but we are still trying to figure out what it is and how to do it.
S. W. & K. S.
March 3rd, 2026
