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The anti-ICE resistance is working | Judith Levine

Resistance, in physics, is the force that hinders the flow of charged electrons as they zigzag from point to point. Resistance doesn’t stop the flow of electricity. Instead, it causes heat.

Popular resistance works the same way. It obstructs and slows the government’s business, creating political heat and slowing it further.

That’s what is happening to Trump’s mass deportation campaign. It started with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arresting a few international students who protested against the Gaza war. Then the masked men began ambushing migrants in courthouse hallways after routine check-ins and mandated status proceedings. Court watchers led by immigrants’ rights advocates and lawyers showed up to bear witness and offer aid.

Before long, ICE and border patrol agents were roving the streets of Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and other blue cities, indiscriminately scooping up brown, Black and non-English-speaking people, busting down doors without warrants and escalating confrontations with protesters.

In response, the small cadres of immigrants’ rights advocates were morphing into a mass movement of immigrant defense. Along with community groups and progressive organizations, they organized hyper-local rapid response teams, established hotlines and encrypted mobile-app chatgroups, developed ICE tracker software, printed know-your-rights cards in many languages, distributed whistles and taught responders the code – repeated short blasts for “ICE in the area”; long blows for “form a crowd, stay loud” – as well as protocols for nonviolent protest and usable documentation of the government’s abuses.

By the time “Operation Metro Surge” hit Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, residents were primed to fight back. From houses and stores, in cars and on bicycles, people of every age, race and political stripe dogged ICE wherever it went. The protesters wore inflatable animal costumes, flak jackets and parkas heavy enough to brave weather so cold it froze the ink in reporters’ pens. They withstood teargas, police batons and arrests. And when agents fatally shot two US citizens in January, cellphone videographers were there to record the killings – and disseminate the images around the world on social media.

Public opinion swung decisively against Trump, the then homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and “commander at large” Greg Bovino. The government was forced to retreat.

Bovino was dispatched into early retirement and replaced by the less flamboyantly fascistic “border czar” Tom Homan. Trump announced he would no longer send federal troops to intervene in anti-ICE protests. He pretended to be tired of elected officials’ griping and predicted they would soon beg for help: “They have to say: ‘Please.’” But he hadn’t pulled back until those officials – Minnesota’s attorney general and the Twin Cities’ mayors – sued over ICE’s unconstitutional actions during the surge.

Soon Noem was out on her ear. In confirmation hearings, the new DHS chief, Markwayne Mullin, promised to require judicial warrants to enter homes or businesses.

On 14 February, the Democrats refused to fund the immigration enforcement functions of homeland security unless the Republicans agreed to significant reforms reining in ICE’s lawlessness. A partial shutdown ensued. Six weeks into it, the Democrats left Washington without the reforms. But the Republicans left without funding ICE and are still haggling over how to do it. The Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, declared victory, but unlike in the past, he did not end the shutdown. It’s fair to say that without rising popular pressure, he would have cracked.

On 24 March, in a letter to a New York federal judge, the justice department admitted it had “erroneously” relied on an ICE memo permitting the arrests of hundreds of unsuspecting immigrants emerging from their court appearances. The memo “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near ... immigration courts”, said the letter. The justice department lawyers also all but stated that ICE had misled them. Homeland security told NPR it would not change the policy. But we’ll see: their legal justification is blown.

And Trump is quietly telling his inner circle to cool the aggressive immigration enforcement and even stop using the phrase “mass deportation”.

The resistance has not yet won. Since September, when the supreme court allowed racial profiling of suspected undocumented immigrants in LA to continue, the practice has remained “rampant”, according to the ACLU.

The justice department, when it’s not pursuing Trump’s enemies, is doubling down on immigration prosecutions. A recent ProPublica investigation found that the former attorney general Pam Bondi dropped 23,000 pending fraud, drug trafficking, terrorism and other criminal cases last year to redirect resources toward mass deportation.

Children born in other countries are in the DHS’s sights. The White House adviser Stephen Miller traveled to Texas to urge its Republican-dominated legislature to prohibit public education funding for undocumented kids. Even children with papers aren’t safe. Of the half-million kids adopted from abroad since the 1940s, about 200,000 are not legally naturalized in a confusing system. While the DHS picks these kids off, a bipartisan bill automatically granting citizenship to all foreign adoptees languishes in committee.

The supreme court looks open to allowing the Trump administration to turn away asylum seekers and refugees at the Mexican border, forcing them to remain in camps where food and sanitation are scarce and violence is rampant.

And then there’s Trump’s executive order abolishing birthright citizenship for the babies of undocumented immigrants. Numerous federal courts ruled against Trump, saying the fourth amendment’s definition of citizens could not be plainer: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In oral arguments earlier this month the supreme court justices showed skepticism of the government’s arcane interpretation of the constitution.

Civil libertarians are cautiously relieved. But the fact that the high court opted to hear the case at all, and not let the lower rulings stand, is a sign of how precarious immigrants’ lives, and the foundations of US democracy, are in 2026.

If electricity meets resistance on one path, it seeks others. The government will find new ways to enact its racist, cruel and economically destructive anti-immigration agenda. That means opponents must continue to resist in the courts, at the polls and in the streets. The pathways for this dark energy are not endless. And when circuits overheat enough, they break.