As immigration enforcement escalates, popular resistance is growing

While deportation campaigns intensify nationwide, resistance is growing on both legal and grassroots levels.

This escalation reached flashpoints with the fatal shooting of American citizens Renée Good on January 7, and of Alex Pretti on January 24 — both by federal immigration agents during protests in Minneapolis. 

In both cases, the Trump administration defended the killing as self-defense by the agent, and denied state investigators access to the shooting scene.

“The killing of Renée Nicole Good illustrated what we have been saying all along: The attacks on immigrants are the tip of the spear on attacks on all Americans. This mass deportation agenda, as much as this administration had said it will only target ‘criminals’ — we are now seeing in real time that they are affecting everyone, noncitizen and citizen alike,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America´s Voice, at an American Community Media briefing held one day before Pretti’s shooting amid widespread protests.

The ongoing protests are in response to Operation Metro Surge, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has called “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out,” involving the arrest of over 3,000 people.

The operation also involved the largest deployment of federal immigration agents to Minneapolis in history, with a total of 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents now operating in the city, — about five times the size of the Minneapolis Police Department, which has about 600 officers.

“Americans are seeing in real time what an enforcement-only agenda looks like, and they’re recoiling from it,” said Cárdenas. “But even though most Americans reject what ICE is doing, that does not mean they support Democrat solutions for reforms … That’s why we have to navigate this moment carefully in terms of bringing people into our coalition.”

Immigration enforcement, and subsequent clashes between protesters and federal agents, is fracturing even Republican support for the administration’s actions.

A YouGov poll conducted a day after Pretti’s shooting found that “More Americans support than oppose abolishing ICE (46% vs. 41%),” while “A majority (57%) of Americans somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way ICE is handling its job. Only 37% approve.”

Meanwhile, a new POLITICO poll shows that one in five voters who backed Trump in 2024 say the mass deportation campaign is too aggressive. 

Moreover, 41% of Trump voters say that while they support the deportation campaign’s goals, they disapprove of how he is implementing it.

The class-action and state lawsuits that have emerged to stop the immigration enforcement surge “show a dynamic where district courts are ruling in favor of plaintiffs on injunctions, which are just pauses, only to have circuit courts roll back those those pauses,” said Ann Garcia, staff attorney for the National Immigration Project.

On January 26, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate a district judge’s injunction barring federal immigration agents from retaliating against protesters during Operation Metro Surge; this case involved Tincher v. Noem, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Minnesota on December 17, 2025 on behalf of six Minnesota residents.

Five days prior, an internal ICE memo was leaked authorizing agents to forcibly enter homes without a judge’s warrant, but only with an administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal.

“I imagine that will be challenged. There’s nothing legal about this,” said Garcia. “For many decades, courts have been abundantly clear on this point: Administrative warrants do not permit the government to enter a home or other private spaces. Only a judicially authorized warrant is valid to enter, search, arrest a person.”

“It’s a matter of the politicization of our judiciary,” she added. “Part of the reason that people are galvanized and going into the streets is because they realize that … at this point, it’s not just the freedoms of immigrant neighbors. It’s your freedom.”

On the ground, “I’m seeing tens of thousands of my neighbors organized in local teams, providing rides and food support and rental assistance to families who are afraid to leave their homes and staying home, doing ICE watch and patrolling schools to make sure that our kids can come and go from school safely, and these kinds of initiatives are happening all across the state,” said Amanda Otero, co-executive director of Take Action Minnesota and a parent of two kids in Minnesota public schools.

“We are seeing catalyzing events every single day,” she explained. “The day before Renee was killed, at my child’s preschool, as parents were arriving, getting their little kids in their little snow suits up to the door and handing them over to the staff, teachers and parents looked up and, not a block away, watched federal agents tear gassing folks and arresting legal observers. Parents and teachers made eye contact and said, ‘Okay, kids, let’s go,’ and shoveled those kids in a little more quickly.”

Otero, part of a growing network of over 1,000 parents that have built sanctuary school teams in 40 public school sites across Minneapolis and who are now training parents in other school districts statewide to peacefully ensure that kids can safely enter and leave school, and to help families staying home by offering food, rent aid and transportation to critical appointments.

“In Minneapolis and in Minnesota, I have never seen this many people get off the sidelines and take action, doing organizing to keep us safe,” she said. “The scale of what I’m seeing makes it very clear that whether you were supportive of ICE before or not, this moment is pushing so many more people to take a new step.”

“As lawyers, we would use the language of unconstitutionality, but really that’s just a substitute for the moral evaluation of what’s happening,” said Mark Tushnet, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

“One of the most encouraging things about the current situation is precisely the degree of popular opposition,” he continued. “Elected politicians say ‘We ran on these programs,’ that ‘People are behind us’ … One way of showing it’s wrong is through popular demonstrations and resistance in the street.”

“It’s not the law in the abstract that solves these problems. It’s people standing behind their particular vision of what the law should be,” Tushnet added. “From the point of view of a constitutional lawyer: Don’t count on the courts, but go to the streets and the courts will follow.”