As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime.

It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned.

Rubio’s letter notified DHS that he had revoked both targets’ visas, setting in motion plans for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and attempt to deport them, according to a senior DHS official and another U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the operation against Khalil took shape.

In addition to the two names in Rubio’s initial letter, the State Department has also sent the names of “one or two” more students whose visas it has revoked, according to the DHS official, who described the first group of names as an opening move, with “more to come.”

The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said.

Khalil, 30, a graduate student who became a prominent leader of campus demonstrations against the war in Gaza last spring, was taken into custody one day after Rubio sent the letter to DHS. The circumstances of his arrest and detention have set off alarms about the Trump administration’s willingness to test First Amendment protections and wield its power over noncitizens in order to intimidate protesters.

Trump has said on social media that Khalil’s is “the first arrest of many to come.”

The ICE agents who arrested Khalil on March 8 were from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which typically handles counternarcotics, counterterrorism, and other transnational crimes, rather than civil immigration enforcement. Khalil’s attorney did not respond to inquiries today.

[Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants]

A copy of the charging document ICE filed—published yesterday by The Washington Post—suggests that the government’s formal allegations against Khalil were drafted in haste.

The document, called a Notice to Appear, identifies Khalil as a citizen of Algeria who was born in Syria. It states that he was admitted to the United States “at unknown place on or about unknown date,” even though DHS is the federal entity in possession of visa holders’ entry data.

The document then appears to make a significant error, according to Andrew Rankin, a Memphis immigration attorney who has been following Khalil’s case.

It states that Khalil became a legal permanent resident under a specific statute in immigration law, which is true, but refers to the wrong one. “The document was written very unprofessionally,” Rankin told me. “When DHS realizes what they’ve done, they’ll be begging the judge to let them correct it.”

Although the State Department has broad latitude to revoke a foreign student’s visa and DHS can deport them, someone with legal permanent residency—a green-card holder—has to be stripped of that status by an immigration judge before they can be deported.

That routinely happens when a green-card holder commits a serious crime. But Khalil has not been charged with a crime. Trump-administration officials are trying to remove him using an extraordinary and seldom-cited authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the secretary of state to personally determine that an immigrant’s presence in the United States has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

[Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext]

Troy Edgar, who was confirmed earlier this week as DHS deputy secretary, struggled to explain that rationale during a contentious NPR interview broadcast this morning. When Edgar claimed that Khalil had engaged in anti-Semitic political activities in support of Hamas, the NPR host Michel Martin pressed Edgar to say what specific laws he’d broken or whether he had engaged in pro-Hamas propaganda.

As Edgar grew flustered, he told Martin she could “see it on TV.”

“We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Edgar said.

Martin asked if protest activity constitutes “a deportable offense.” Edgar didn’t answer.

At Columbia, Khalil was one of the protest movement’s most prominent figures. Administration officials say his criticism of Israel fueled anti-Semitism on campus and aligned with the violent radicalism of terrorists. But their case for his deportation rests with the rarely tested authorities of the secretary of state to expel someone based on U.S. foreign-policy interests.

Immigration attorneys tracking the case say the administration is looking to test the boundaries of U.S. immigration law and speech protections. The First Amendment does not protect speech that incites violence, Rankin noted. Trump officials, including Rubio, claim that Khalil and other protesters threatened and intimidated Jewish students, but have not cited specific acts.

“There are kids at these schools that can’t go to class,” Rubio told reporters this week, referring to Jewish students, many of whom had faced harassment. “You pay all this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even go to class.”

“If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” he added. “If you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.”

The day after Khalil’s arrest, the government whisked him to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His attorneys said they were unable to speak privately with him for several days.

If U.S. immigration courts side against Khalil and declare him deportable, he could file an appeal. If he loses, his attorneys could ask a U.S. district court in Louisiana to stop his deportation. Because he is in Louisiana, his case would fall under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a reputation as the nation’s most conservative appeals court. Two DHS officials said the government moved him to Louisiana to seek the most favorable venue for its arguments.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration lawyer and the author of a widely used legal sourcebook, said the government’s claims against Khalil have no recent comparison, and would likely be precedent-setting. “This is a test case,” he said.

Khalil’s lawyers are trying to get him returned to New York. A district-court judge in New York has barred the government from deporting Khalil until his case is resolved, but the judge has not ordered the administration to return him to New York. Khalil is scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in Louisiana on March 27.

In a filing Thursday night, Khalil's attorneys told the district court in New York that their client was being punished for engaging in legally protected protest activity. “The Trump administration has made no secret of its opposition to those protests and has repeatedly threatened to weaponize immigration law to punish noncitizens who have participated,” his attorneys said, asking the court to bring Khalil back from Louisiana, order his release, and block the government’s case.

Trump-administration officials view the moves targeting foreign students as part of their wider immigration-enforcement crackdown. Trump is planning to invoke executive authorities, including a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as soon as tomorrow, according to a White House official who was not authorized to discuss internal plans.

Trump has grown frustrated that the pace of deportations has lagged behind what he promised on the campaign trail, and he has urged DHS officials to accelerate their efforts, the official said. He also said the president may try to use the 18th-century law to target specific groups, including suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Trump previewed that move while he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. The White House official cautioned that the timing was fluid and the administration may not publicize it in advance, because it is convinced that press leaks have hindered previous deportation operations.

Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.

Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer.

In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus. The administration announced that it was slashing $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It followed up this action by detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia as a grad student last year. The arrest was carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism. It called in police to clear out a building takeover by anti-Israel activists. Just a few weeks ago, two Barnard students were expelled after disrupting an Israeli-history course and distributing flyers depicting a Jewish star being stepped on by a jackboot.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

If you wish to understand the thought process that led to this point, a good place to begin would be a short missive written last month by Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo argued that the ascendant right needs to reject left-wing “cancel culture,” but not settle for returning to liberal norms. “All cultures cancel,” he wrote. “The question is, for what, and by whom.” This echoed, either consciously or unconsciously, Vladimir Lenin’s famous dictum, “Who, Whom?,” by which he defined politics as entirely a question of which class would dominate the other, rejecting any possibility of liberal accommodation.

Rufo chose as his explanatory example the case of Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after his exposure for having written openly racist posts (including, literally, “I was racist before it was cool”), only to be rehired after a public intervention by Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. “The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture,” Rufo explained, “demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.”

The key term here is loyalty. Protection would be afforded only to allies. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward,” Rufo argued, which would enable the right to “protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

The sole guiding principle at work is the defense of allies and the punishment of foes. Trump and his allies may purport to be following other values, but they barely bother with even the pretense of consistency. Trump will claim to defend free speech while launching a campaign to punish campus demonstrators on the basis of their viewpoints. (Many anti-Israel protesters have espoused ghastly political views, including support for the October 7 murders, but free speech means nothing if not preventing the government from punishing ideas it disagrees with.) He will occasionally justify his repression as simply a crackdown on disorder and other forms of misconduct, while granting sweeping pardons to the perpetrators of a violent mob assault on the Capitol.

That spirit of pure will to power—who, whom—has defined the administration’s gleefully selective approach to “combating” anti-Semitism, which in practice seems to mean using anti-Semitism as a pretext to intimidate its opponents while simultaneously cultivating its own anti-Semitic faction.

Trump’s rise over the past decade has broadened the Republican coalition in many ways—including by pulling in far-right activists previously considered too racist to be permitted in the tent. During his first campaign and presidential term, Trump courted these factions with wink-and-nod rhetoric: calling his movement “America First” (a label previously used by the isolationist right before World War II), gesturing toward the “Great Replacement” theory (the idea, circulated by white supremacists, that mass immigration is a left-wing plot to transform American politics and culture), attacking his Republican critics as “globalists,” and refusing to denounce even virulently racist figures, such as David Duke, who supported him.

During his second term, the embrace is far less subtle. Winks and nods have been replaced by public Nazi salutes. Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker, recently received a special intervention from the White House allowing him to travel to the United States, presumably because he is loyal to Trump. (The president has denied involvement in that decision.) His extensive list of moral abominations includes overtly anti-Semitic statements, including praise for Hamas and the October 7 attacks.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump has turned the GOP into a white-supremacist or Nazi party. The still-disturbing reality is that he has brought white supremacists and Nazis into the coalition. As such, they receive his protection.

Right-wing anti-Semitism has exploded as a consequence of the Trumpist no-enemies-to-the-right principle. Elon Musk has made X both more central to conservative messaging and distinctly friendlier to anti-Semitic messages. Just this past week, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan credulously interviewed a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

It is true that anti-Semitism has also surged on the left, frequently disguised as anti-Zionism. The key difference is that it has utterly failed to gain legitimacy within the Democratic Party. Indeed, the movements that have given comfort to anti-Semitism on the left have exuded hostility toward the Democrats, sometimes even expressing a preference for Trump. Democrats have managed to keep left-wing anti-Semitism marginal because they recognize that it exists. By denying right-wing anti-Semitism, Republicans have allowed it to spread.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How colleges should address anti-Semitism]

Jew hatred is now crossing a threshold of political viability such that even prominent Republicans in safe congressional seats hesitate to denounce it. Consider this telling response by Senator Lindsey Graham to Kingsley Wilson’s anti-Semitic invective: “I’m not gonna tell them who to hire, but I do know that Trump doesn’t believe any of the things she’s talking about, and I’ll leave it up to them to determine if they think she’s the right spokesperson. If what you say about these posts are true, then she’s completely off-script with President Trump.”

Graham is trying to signal, as tepidly as possible, that the White House should fire Wilson by calling her “off-script with President Trump.” But by saying he won’t tell Trump whom to hire, he frees the president from any standard of accountability. Graham opposes anti-Semitism, but his opposition must yield to the highest imperative, Trump is always right.

The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy.

The federal government has provided no evidence that Mahmoud Khalil has committed a criminal offense, and yet on Saturday night, he was taken by agents of the state from his home and renditioned to a detention facility where neither his pregnant wife nor his lawyer have had access to him.

Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States and Palestinian activist who helped lead the protests at Columbia University over the Israel-Hamas war last spring, seems to have been disappeared by the U.S. government because of his political views. Khalil was among the students urging the university to cut financial and educational ties with Israel. (Unlike with other categories of immigrants, revoking the status of legal permanent residents generally requires evidence of wrongdoing.)

Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had “proudly apprehended” Khalil, describing him as a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson described Khalil as having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” There is, notably, not even a hint of an allegation of criminal behavior in that description. They do not accuse him of being a member of, fighting for, or providing material support to any terrorist group, all of which are prosecutable crimes. The phrasing aligned to implies that if Trump-administration officials think the views of a green-card holder are unacceptable, they can deprive him of his freedom. How does one even prove they are not “aligned” with Hamas, a subjective and arbitrary judgment that could be thrown at anyone deemed too critical of the Israeli government?

Government officials have told reporters that Khalil’s green card was revoked under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that authorizes the secretary of state to expel an “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Trump supporters have a remarkable ability to coalesce around whatever explanation they are told to repeat, so the arguments defending the detention are likely to orient around this justification. The idea that Khalil’s views might have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States is an obvious pretext for expelling him—and a message to others who might hold or express similar beliefs. Trumpists simply do not approve of his politics and have therefore resorted to using the power of the state to deport him. Trump has styled himself a champion of free speech, but this is what Trumpists mean by “free speech”: You can say what Trumpists want you to say or you can be punished.

[David A. Graham: The free-speech phonies]

Trump has announced as much, declaring that the administration would not tolerate “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” That is an admission that Khalil’s arrest is not about consequences for American foreign policy but about punishing speech. The administration is using the power of the state to silence people who express political views that Trump dislikes. And it is worth noting that Trumpists define any criticism of Trump as “anti-American.”

Due process is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. Without it, anyone can be arbitrarily deprived of life or liberty. Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants. They call someone a terrorist, and they dare you to defend the rights of terrorists. And if you believe none of these apply to you, another category might be “traitor,” the label that Trump and his advisers, including the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, like to give to anyone who opposes them.

Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.

The Trump administration began its drive for absolute power by ignoring congressional appropriations of foreign aid, which are laws. It calculated that Americans would be callous enough not to care about the catastrophic loss of human life abroad and that the absence of backlash would enable the administration to set a precedent for defying duly passed laws without consequence. Trump began his assault on antidiscrimination law with a vicious campaign against trans people—but has already broadened that campaign into a sweeping attempt at a great resegregation of American life. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil begins a dangerous new phase, in which the Trump administration will attempt to assert an authority to deprive people of due process based on their political views.

The Anti-Defamation League, a pale shadow of its former self, enthusiastically endorsed Khalil’s detainment absent due process, saying it “appreciated” the Trump administration’s “bold set of efforts to counter campus anti-semitism” by “holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.” Although the statement includes the caveat that “any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections,” praising the Trump administration for arresting Khalil absent any such process makes clear that the question of Khalil’s guilt is an afterthought. One source of legal authority that the administration appears to be citing is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, whose co-sponsor Senator Patrick McCarran believed that Jews were “subversive rats that need to be kept out” of the country. If there is one obvious lesson of Jewish history, it is that when governments persecute people based on their political views and ethnic background, it is unlikely to end well for Jews. The ADL learned different lessons from that history, I suppose.

This sort of reaction, where a self-styled civil-rights organization endorses depriving people of their basic rights of speech and due process because they find the target unsympathetic, is what the Trumpists are counting on. Trumpists are counting on as many people as possible shutting off their conscience, because the administration has picked a target it hopes few will defend. They are counting on the public deciding that free speech and due process are optional for this category of people or that one, and that they will be safe, as they have done nothing wrong. The Trump administration wishes to lull people into this complacency until it is too late to react.

This kind of arrogance has a poor track record historically. Despots are always in need of powerful enemies to justify an insatiable drive for absolute power. Where none exist, they will invent them. Mass graves across the world are full of those who believed they had nothing to fear.

This is what is important: It does not matter if you approve of Khalil’s views. It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.

One recent morning on Chicago’s southwest side, the manager of a Mexican grocery store began the day posted at the front door, rehearsing the phrase “I wish to exercise my right to remain silent” in English in case immigration agents showed up asking about employees.

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

A month into President Donald Trump’s promise to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, this is what life was becoming in a neighborhood where generations of Mexican immigrants had built versions of American lives: People were in various stages of preparing for a crackdown that felt more imminent every day.

Although much of the controversy around immigration has focused on the southern border and recent waves of asylum seekers from Venezuela, Haiti, and Central America, anxiety over Trump’s deportation plan is seeping into the nation’s more long-standing population of undocumented immigrants. Experts estimate that at least 11 million people are in the United States without legal status, about 4 million of whom are Mexicans, many with deep roots in cities and towns across a nation whose central hypocrisy has long been to use the cheap labor that immigrants supply, while often demonizing them for political expedience.

[Read: The deportation show]

Since Trump returned to office last month, his administration has claimed that it is rounding up immigrants with violent criminal backgrounds, though little information has been released about detainees so far. During the first two weeks of his current term, more than 8,000 people were arrested, including more than 100 in the Chicago area, a number roughly in line with enforcement surges in the past. What mattered more was the ever more dire message people were hearing.

Trump was no longer simply using terms such as “bloodthirsty criminals” and “animals” to describe immigrants. In a barrage of militaristic propaganda and executive orders, he was declaring them to be enemies and spies, and the situation at the southern border an “invasion.” His border czar, Tom Homan, was calling bystanders swept up in raids “collaterals,” the blithe euphemism for civilians killed in wars. Trump was preparing to designate foreign drug cartels and gangs as “terrorists,” and pledging to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which could give the administration extraordinary wartime powers to bypass due process and accelerate deportations. U.S. forces were building a tent city at Guantánamo Bay. Before being repatriated, a group of Venezuelan detainees had been held at a prison that once housed al-Qaeda suspects. In recent days, Trump was reportedly growing impatient with the pace of deportations, reassigning his acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And hour by hour, all of this was filtering into the social-media feeds and WhatsApp groups of people trying to figure out what was going to happen next.

[Read: The ‘right way’ to immigrate just went wrong]

“It’s the rhetoric; it’s the dehumanization; it’s the narrative of what Trump is making people think about us,” Eréndira Rendón, an immigrant-rights advocate in Chicago, told me. She herself had been brought to the U.S. as a child, and her legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was uncertain. “It feels more intense this time,” Rendón said, comparing the moment with previous crackdowns during Trump’s first term, and during the Obama administration before that. “Like there is no going back.”

That feeling was widespread in southwest Chicago, where dozens of people told me that they had no choice but to take Trump’s rhetoric seriously. The level of anxiety was such that almost no one wanted their name used, or their specific location mentioned, for fear of attracting the attention of immigration agents. The people I spoke with included restaurant workers, shopkeepers, meatpackers, construction workers, lawyers, a graphic designer, a teacher, and parents of American children, some of whom were attending a “Know Your Rights” seminar in the back of a public library one night.

“You should memorize your alien number,” an advocate named Laura was saying, referring to a number assigned to track noncitizens. “It starts with the letter A and is nine digits. This is how your loved ones will be able to find you.”

By the first week in February, life on the southwest side had entered a kind of limbo. In the days before Trump’s inauguration, several people told me, they had stockpiled food. Now the streets were quiet. School attendance was down. Attendance was down at a Catholic church that had welcomed immigrants for generations. “We are preparing for the worst,” the priest there told me; he requested anonymity to avoid drawing scrutiny to a place he was trying to keep safe.

He had tried to reassure people of this, even though the Trump administration had just rescinded a policy protecting places of worship, schools, and other sensitive locations from immigration raids. The priest had promised that he was not going to fling open the front doors for agents, even though Trump was threatening to prosecute anyone interfering with enforcement. He’d done the only other thing he knew to do: On a table just inside the heavy wooden front doors of his church, he’d set out a stack of pamphlets with hotlines and names of lawyers who could help people sign over belongings, transfer home titles, establish guardians for children.

Outside, the steeple rose above a neighborhood of rowhouses and battered mailboxes with one name taped or painted over another—Ariza, Arevalo, Ramirez. In the past two years, thousands of Venezuelan migrants had arrived, but the dominant immigrant community was composed of Mexicans, many of whom had arrived in the 1990s after NAFTA sent a flood of subsidized U.S. corn across the border, decimating small farmers. At this point, lives were settled. The names and images of Mexican heroes and saints were chiseled on schools and framed on walls—Benito Juárez, Cesar Chavez, Óscar Romero, a thousand Virgins of Guadalupe. A commercial strip was packed with Western Unions, taquerias, and shops named for Mexican towns. A photography studio had sun-faded images of weddings propped in the window. Businesses were open, but many of their front doors were locked.

There had been reports of a man detained in an adjacent neighborhood, and rumors of ICE trucks patrolling. At a clothing store, the owners, a married couple, buzzed people in only after screening them. In came a delivery guy wearing a face mask. In came the undocumented man who lived above the shop. A portable television on a glass counter was blaring something about Trump. “This man is crazy,” the husband was saying.

He and his wife both told me that they had legal status, but worried that Trump was taking away protections for whole categories of immigrants. Their three grandchildren were born in the U.S., but Trump was trying to abolish birthright citizenship. Besides the man who lived upstairs, a daughter-in-law who lived with them was undocumented, which made the shop owners possible “collaterals,” and so they were saving money for lawyers. They were considering selling the business, and imagining what might be left for them back in Guanajuato, Mexico, after 28 years away.

Everyone had some plan. A couple decided that if one of them got picked up, the other would signal trouble by texting random letters.

At a restaurant, the cashier’s strategy was to stay inside except for work. “I don’t walk my dog. I don’t do laundry. I canceled my doctor,” she told me. She was in the process of establishing residency but had little confidence this would save her. She’d given her lawyer’s number to a friend. “If they come, I cannot start running,” she said.

Down the street, the grocery-store manager had gone over a plan with workers. If immigration agents came, employees were to calmly walk to areas designated as private, where agents were not supposed to go without a specific judicial warrant: up a spiral staircase to an office; behind the meat counter. A back door was open. The owner had recorded a video message as if preparing them for battle. “Your strength inspires us all,” he said. “We are with you.”

At the public library, people took notes as Laura, the advocate, explained about alien numbers, and which rights undocumented immigrants still had in America.

“You have a right to be silent, but you have to say so,” she said. “Say: ‘I wish to remain silent,’” she told them, and they repeated the phrase. She continued: You have a right to refuse to sign anything. You have a right to refuse to open your door, or to open it only a few inches; any wider could be interpreted as permission to enter. You should know the difference between an administrative warrant and a judicial warrant, and insist that the officer slip it under the door or press it against a window. You should know what to expect if a warrant is valid.

“They might break down the door,” Laura said, telling people not to panic if that happened, not to run, which could make the situation turn violent.

A woman raised her hand. “If they are looking for someone who used to live in this place before, can they enter?”

“Let them know they don’t live there anymore, but it is up to them to believe you,” Laura said.

“If I’m not at home, but my kid is, can they enter?” came another question. Laura explained that if the child says their mother or father isn’t home, agents might not accept it. “They can enter because they will think the child can lie,” she said.

She continued: Do provide ICE agents with your date of birth. Do familiarize yourself with locations of detention facilities. The nearest are in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky.

“How long is the process to get people back?” someone asked.

“It depends,” Laura said, explaining how the detention process could go.

“Your cellphone is going to be taken away,” she said, handing out pamphlets. “You will have to request to make phone calls.”

If due process is followed, she said, you get to contact your lawyer. If you are eligible for bond, it is $6,000 on average. And if you make bond, your case joins a backlog of 3.5 million cases, built up over decades. “It could take years,” she said.

If you are unable to prove that you’ve been in the country longer than two years, though, due process may no longer apply, Laura said. She explained that Trump had recently expanded a policy called expedited removal that used to apply only to border areas but now applied to the whole country. In theory, you could be transferred directly to a waiting airplane, Laura said, advising people to start carrying old utility bills or leases to prove long-term residency.

She continued for a while, advising people not to carry any documents that would identify them as a citizen of Mexico or any foreign country. She warned that immigration agents might be driving any kind of car, or wearing any kind of clothes, and that the situation was fluid. The old rules could change any day.

“It’s hard to know what is going to happen,” she said. “It’s hard to plan.”

People exchanged phone numbers, and when the session was over, Laura did what she has been doing most nights since Trump’s inauguration, which was to pick up her undocumented father from the restaurant where he worked, sleep a few hours, and then start another day of Know Your Rights seminars. She had given dozens all over the city. Homan, Trump’s border czar, was calling such events “How to Escape Arrest” seminars.

“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals,” he’d said on CNN. “For instance, Chicago, very well educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

Chicago activists took this as a minor victory; the city had a long and proud history of immigrant-rights advocacy, and had often set the tone for how activists around the country would handle federal crackdowns. A veteran immigrant-rights advocate named Omar Lopez, who had been involved in the cause since the early 1960s, told me that he believed this was one reason Chicago was among the Trump administration’s first targets.

“I think they wanted to see how Chicago would respond,” Lopez said. His organization was planning work stoppages and boycotts in the months ahead.

But one month into the Trump administration, he and others worried that the barrage of propaganda casting detainees as “criminals” and “the worst of the worst” was taking hold, stifling protest, even though federal authorities had released little information about who was actually being detained. No one wanted to be perceived as standing up for criminals.

“Once that idea takes hold, we’ve lost the narrative,” Rendón said.

There were rumors that the organizations such as the one where Laura worked were going to be targeted next, which the leaders took seriously enough that they told all their employees to stay home for a few days. Homan had floated the idea of prosecuting Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, for spearheading a similar effort in her district. Even hardened attorneys understood that legal challenges would not necessarily stop a Trump administration determined to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Those challenges were mostly based on due-process rights; ultimately, the president had the power to pursue an aggressive deportation policy.

“People are saying to me, ‘Aren’t you going to stop this?’ Well, no, we’re not going to stop all of it in court, because deporting people who are here illegally is not, per se, unlawful,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who argued the challenge to the family-separation policy and other high-profile cases during Trump’s first administration, told me. “The immigration laws are incredibly harsh. The only way this is going to be stopped is if the American public rejects it.”

[From the September 2023 issue: An American catastrophe]

But there has been no large-scale rejection, not yet, and in many corners of Trump-supporting America, people have been cheering him on. For now, there was the quiet of a neighborhood where people were memorizing alien numbers, locking doors, and hiding inside houses, including one where the curtains were drawn on a bright afternoon and a cooler full of stockpiled food sat on the front stoop.

Inside, Consuelo was waiting for her husband to return to the home they’d bought with money from his job as a busboy, waiter, and bartender at the country club, and from her jobs at a shampoo factory, a metal-shelf factory, a frozen-food factory, and a florist, and stuffing envelopes on the night shift. The rest was their American life: photos of two American-born children on a piano, a box of dried mangoes on top of the refrigerator, a Virgin of Guadalupe on a kitchen wall, crucifixes in the living room, and so many saints and prayer candles these days that Consuelo’s son complained that they lived in a church.

He was 21, and she had been busy preparing him for the next four years under Trump. If agents came to the door, he was the one designated to answer. He would tell them his parents were not home. In a few days, she would sign over the house to him. She would put his name on the bank accounts. If she was deported, she planned to take her teenage daughter, who has autism. Her son would petition to bring his mother and sister back, a process she knew could take years, and might not happen at all. In the late afternoon, waiting for her husband to return from work, she thought about the town in Mexico where she’d spent her childhood and young-adult life. It was difficult to picture. Her parents had died. People she once knew were gone. What she knew was the life that she was beginning to think of in the past tense.

“This has been my home,” she said.