When Resistance Reveals Institutional Failure: A Response to The Bulwark on Immigration Enforcement

The people of Minneapolis aren't leading—they're screaming that our enforcement mechanisms are fundamentally broken

In a recent piece for The Bulwark, William Kristol celebrates the citizens of Minneapolis as exemplars of democratic resistance, arguing that “the people are leading” while elected Democrats timidly follow. His narrative frames civic action—protests outside hotels housing ICE agents, community surveillance networks tracking federal vehicles, physical confrontations with enforcement officers—as democratic leadership that Congress should emulate by defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s a stirring call to action, and Kristol deserves credit for taking seriously both the Minneapolis community’s sustained resistance and the urgent need for democratic accountability in immigration enforcement.

But as an economist who studies institutional design and mechanism design, I find myself troubled by a different question: What does it mean when ordinary citizens must organize neighborhood watch networks, compile license plate databases, and physically interpose themselves between federal agents and their neighbors? Kristol sees democratic vitality. I see institutional failure.

The Minneapolis resistance isn’t leading us toward better policy. It’s a symptom of a system so fundamentally broken that it forces citizens into impossible choices between complicity and extralegal resistance. And the solution isn’t simply to defund ICE, as Kristol proposes—it’s to rebuild immigration enforcement from the ground up with proper institutional constraints, transparent processes, and accountability mechanisms that make such desperate resistance unnecessary.

The Mechanism Design Perspective

Mechanism design—the branch of economics concerned with designing rules and institutions that produce desired outcomes—offers a useful lens for understanding what’s gone wrong in Minneapolis. A well-designed enforcement mechanism should create incentive-compatible outcomes where following the rules produces better results than breaking them, both for enforcers and those subject to enforcement.

The current ICE operations in Minneapolis spectacularly fail this test. According to multiple reports, federal agents have been stopping vehicles without probable cause, detaining U.S. citizens, operating with masked faces that prevent identification, and conducting what residents describe as “zone enforcement” rather than targeted operations. Two U.S. citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—were fatally shot by federal agents in January 2026, deaths that remain under investigation with the Trump administration actively obstructing cooperation with state investigators.

This isn’t enforcement. It’s extractive institutional design—a system optimized for removing people rather than sorting legitimate cases from illegitimate ones, for maximizing arrests rather than maximizing justice. The incentives are all wrong: agents are rewarded for numbers, not accuracy; for compliance, not legitimacy; for speed, not due process.

When institutions create these perverse incentives, rational actors respond predictably. Federal agents mask their faces because they fear accountability. Community members track license plates because official oversight has failed. Residents physically block vehicles because legal remedies are too slow or nonexistent. Each side escalates because the institutional structure offers no better path.

Kristol is right that this situation is intolerable. But his proposed solution—Democratic senators refusing to fund ICE—misdiagnosses the disease. The problem isn’t funding levels. It’s that we’ve built an enforcement apparatus with virtually no meaningful constraints on its operation.

The Institutional Vacuum

Here’s what’s missing from current immigration enforcement:

Transparent targeting criteria. ICE operations in Minneapolis have been described as zone enforcement rather than targeted enforcement of specific removal orders. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s explanation—”If we are executing an operation focused on a target, there may be individuals surrounding that individual whose identities we may need to validate”—is institution-free reasoning. Under this logic, any neighborhood becomes a valid enforcement zone, any person a potential target requiring “validation.”

Compare this to criminal law enforcement, where police need probable cause for stops and warrants for searches. These aren’t arbitrary restrictions—they’re institutional constraints that create accountability and limit abuse. Immigration enforcement operates in a parallel legal universe where such constraints barely exist.

Meaningful judicial oversight. The civil immigration enforcement system has always operated with less judicial scrutiny than criminal enforcement, justified by the legal distinction between removal and punishment. But the Minneapolis operations reveal how inadequate this framework has become. Federal agents are making split-second decisions about detention and identity verification—decisions that can lead to wrongful arrest of U.S. citizens—with no prior judicial authorization and minimal ex post review.

Senate Democrats have proposed requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, which Republicans dismiss as unworkable. But this objection reveals the problem: we’ve built an enforcement system that can’t function under the constitutional constraints we accept for every other form of law enforcement. That should terrify us.

Officer identification and accountability. Multiple reports describe ICE agents operating with masked faces, making it impossible for citizens to identify officers who may have violated their rights. This is Soviet-style enforcement—anonymous state power accountable to no one.

Senate Democrats have proposed limits on masking by federal agents. This shouldn’t be controversial. If you’re exercising state authority to detain, arrest, or use force against citizens and non-citizens alike, you should be identifiable. The fact that ICE agents resist this basic accountability mechanism tells us everything about the incentive structure they operate within.

Separation of immigration status from general law enforcement. The Obama administration attempted to shift resources toward the border and away from interior enforcement, recognizing that interior operations are far more disruptive to established communities. The Trump administration has reversed this entirely, creating an environment where any interaction with government—taking children to school, driving to medical appointments, appearing at court hearings—risks detention and removal.

This creates impossible tradeoffs for mixed-status families and entire communities. Do you call the police when you witness a crime, knowing you might encounter ICE? Do you take your child to the emergency room, risking detention on the way? These aren’t hypothetical questions in Minneapolis right now—they’re daily calculations that undermine trust in all government institutions, not just immigration enforcement.

Why Defunding Alone Won’t Work

Kristol’s solution is to deny new funding for ICE and Border Patrol, forcing drawdown of the massive five-year appropriation Republicans provided last year. There’s a certain satisfying logic to this: if an agency is operating lawlessly, stop funding it. But as an institutional reform strategy, it’s deeply inadequate.

First, the appropriation is already in place. As Kristol acknowledges, Republicans gave ICE $75 billion through 2029 in last year’s reconciliation bill. The Trump administration is using these resources to lease facilities, contract detention services, and build enforcement capacity that will persist long after the current political moment passes. Refusing additional funding may send a message, but it won’t stop current operations.

Second, funding restrictions without institutional reform simply create new perverse incentives. An underfunded enforcement agency doesn’t become more careful and discriminating—it becomes more brutal and efficient. When resources are scarce, corners get cut, oversight diminishes, and the pressure to produce results intensifies. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in criminal justice contexts: budget cuts lead to higher bail amounts, more plea bargaining, fewer public defenders, worse outcomes for defendants. There’s no reason to expect different results in immigration enforcement.

Third, and most fundamentally, defunding doesn’t address the underlying institutional vacuum. Even if Democrats somehow succeeded in zeroing out ICE’s budget—a political fantasy given current congressional arithmetic—what then? Do we simply have no immigration enforcement? Do we rebuild ICE under a different name? Do we shift responsibilities to other agencies that may be even less constrained?

The immigration enforcement debate has become trapped in a false binary: either robust enforcement without constraints (the Trump position) or no enforcement at all (increasingly the progressive position). Both options are institution-free thinking. We need enforcement that operates under rule of law, with transparent criteria, meaningful oversight, and genuine accountability. That requires building institutions, not just defunding agencies.

What Actual Institutional Reform Would Look Like

If we took mechanism design seriously, immigration enforcement reform would focus on creating incentive structures that reward accuracy, legitimacy, and due process rather than simply maximizing removals. Here are some concrete components:

Warrant requirements for non-border enforcement. Civil libertarians have long advocated for extending Fourth Amendment protections to immigration enforcement. The standard objection—that requiring warrants would make enforcement too slow—reveals how broken our current system is. Criminal law enforcement functions with warrant requirements. Civil regulatory enforcement functions with warrant requirements. Immigration enforcement can too, if we design the system properly.

Requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests away from the border would create several beneficial effects. Judges would review targeting criteria, forcing ICE to articulate specific reasons for detention. The warrant process would create a paper trail for accountability. Officers would need to present evidence before detention rather than simply detaining first and sorting later. Most importantly, it would prevent the zone enforcement model that’s terrorizing Minneapolis, where agents stop anyone who “looks suspicious” and validate identities ex post.

Mandatory body cameras and officer identification. If you exercise state authority to detain or arrest, you should be identifiable and your actions should be recorded. This is standard in urban policing—imperfect but essential for accountability. Immigration enforcement should operate under at least the same constraints.

The resistance to body cameras reveals how far immigration enforcement has drifted from democratic norms. ICE argues that camera footage could endanger officers or reveal enforcement tactics. But police departments have managed these concerns through reasonable policies about footage review and release. ICE can too, unless the real objection is to accountability itself.

Separation of immigration enforcement from routine policing. One of the most corrosive effects of aggressive interior enforcement is the breakdown of trust between immigrant communities and local police. When any traffic stop might lead to ICE detention, entire communities become invisible to law enforcement. Crime goes unreported, witnesses disappear, victims don’t seek help.

The solution is clear institutional boundaries: local police should not be enforcing immigration law, and immigration enforcement should not be piggybacking on routine policing. This requires affirmatively prohibiting information sharing between local police and ICE (beyond serious criminal convictions), restricting ICE access to state databases, and creating clear protocols that prevent mission creep. Several jurisdictions have attempted these reforms with mixed success—but that’s because federal funding and policies actively undermine them.

Genuine oversight mechanisms with teeth. Immigration enforcement currently operates with minimal oversight. Congress holds occasional hearings. Inspectors general write reports that agencies ignore. Courts review removal orders, but only after detention and often after removal.

Effective oversight requires real-time monitoring with authority to halt operations. This could take several forms: civilian review boards with subpoena power, judicial magistrates who must approve major operations before they proceed, mandatory reporting requirements with automatic budget consequences for violations, independent ombudsmen with authority to investigate complaints and impose sanctions.

The key is creating accountability structures where those exercising enforcement authority face meaningful consequences for abuse. Right now, ICE agents who detain U.S. citizens face essentially no professional consequences. Agents who use excessive force aren’t disciplined. Supervisors who approve lawless operations aren’t sanctioned. We’ve created an incentive structure where abuse is costless—so we get abuse.

Narrowed enforcement priorities with mandatory sequencing. Not all immigration violations are equal. Someone who entered unlawfully twenty years ago, built a life, raised U.S. citizen children, and committed no serious crimes presents fundamentally different equities than someone who entered last month with an extensive criminal history.

A well-designed enforcement system would build these distinctions into formal priorities with mandatory sequencing. Serious criminal convictions first. Recent unlawful entries next. Long-term residents with U.S. citizen family members last, if at all. ICE nominally has such priorities, but they’re honored more in the breach—the Minneapolis operations have targeted anyone and everyone, often catching more U.S. citizens and green card holders than removable non-citizens.

Making these priorities mandatory and enforceable—with budget consequences for deviating from the sequence—would force ICE to make difficult tradeoffs and articulate its reasoning. It would also create clear metrics for evaluation: Are you focusing resources on high-priority cases? Are you distinguishing between categories? Are you respecting the sequencing?

The Public Choice Problem

There’s a deeper issue that Kristol’s analysis glosses over: immigration enforcement operates in a political economy where concentrated benefits and diffuse costs create pathological incentives.

The benefits of aggressive enforcement are concentrated and visible: politicians can claim they’re being “tough on immigration,” industry groups get increased appropriations for detention facilities and enforcement technology, law enforcement agencies expand their authority and budgets. The costs—family separation, community disruption, erosion of civil liberties, wrongful detention of citizens—are diffuse and often hidden, borne by populations with limited political power.

This is classic public choice theory: policies that impose concentrated costs on politically weak groups and provide concentrated benefits to politically strong groups tend to persist regardless of their aggregate social welfare effects. It’s why we get ever-increasing enforcement appropriations even as evidence accumulates that aggressive interior enforcement produces minimal benefits while imposing enormous costs on mixed-status families, local governments, and community institutions.

The Minneapolis resistance is attempting to rebalance this equation by making the costs of enforcement visible and imposing direct costs on enforcement agencies—but this is an unstable equilibrium. Eventually either enforcement will be scaled back (unlikely given current political incentives) or resistance will be criminalized and suppressed (already happening, with 158 arrests for impeding federal officers according to recent reports).

Breaking this cycle requires changing the underlying political economy. That means creating institutional constraints that operate automatically rather than depending on political will, building in accountability mechanisms that can’t be easily evaded, and most importantly, giving communities subject to enforcement a genuine voice in how it operates.

What Democrats Should Actually Be Demanding

If I were advising Senate Democrats on the DHS funding fight—and to be clear, no one is asking—here’s what I’d recommend they demand as conditions for any continuing resolution:

1. Mandatory judicial warrants for all interior arrests, with narrow exceptions for hot pursuit and border zones (defined as within 100 miles of international borders or ports of entry, not the current expansive definition).

2. Complete prohibition on masked enforcement, with mandatory visible badge numbers and body cameras for all agents engaged in arrests or detention.

3. Automatic exclusion of evidence and dismissal of removal proceedings for violations of these requirements, making the procedural protections meaningful rather than advisory.

4. Independent oversight board with real-time access to operations, subpoena authority, and power to halt operations that violate procedures—analogous to civilian police review boards but with stronger teeth.

5. Mandatory enforcement sequencing with severe criminal convictions first, recent entries second, long-term residents with family ties last or never, with budget clawbacks for deviations.

6. Absolute prohibition on information sharing between ICE and local police except for final criminal convictions for serious offenses, with severe penalties for violations.

7. Affirmative requirement that all enforcement operations minimize disruption to schools, medical facilities, and houses of worship, with bright-line rules about what’s prohibited.

8. Complete transparency in detention contracts and facility operations, with mandatory public reporting of all significant expenditures and all serious incidents.

These demands would fundamentally constrain ICE’s operations—which is precisely the point. An enforcement agency that can’t operate within these constraints shouldn’t exist. If ICE can’t function with warrant requirements, judicial oversight, officer accountability, and transparent priorities, that’s an argument for abolishing ICE, not for accepting lawless enforcement.

But notice: these demands don’t eliminate enforcement. They channel it through institutional structures that create accountability and protect rights. They make enforcement better—more targeted, more legitimate, more consistent with constitutional norms. A system designed around these constraints might actually do what we claim to want immigration enforcement to do: remove genuinely dangerous individuals while respecting the rights and dignity of everyone else.

Beyond Minneapolis: The Institutional Question

The broader question is whether we can have immigration enforcement that operates under rule of law in a democratic society. The Minneapolis experience suggests we currently can’t—or won’t.

But the failure is a choice, not an inevitability. We’ve designed immigration enforcement to operate outside normal constitutional constraints, with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and incentive structures that reward abuse. Then we act surprised when agents abuse their authority, communities resist, and the entire system descends into chaos.

Kristol is right to elevate the Minneapolis resistance as morally serious. These are citizens putting their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors from lawless government action. That’s civic virtue, and it deserves respect.

But we shouldn’t romanticize resistance as a substitute for functional institutions. The fact that ordinary citizens must organize neighborhood surveillance networks and physically block federal vehicles isn’t a sign of democratic vitality—it’s a sign that our enforcement institutions have failed so completely that extralegal resistance has become the only available check on power.

The solution is neither Kristol’s proposal to defund ICE nor the Trump administration’s commitment to enforcement without constraints. The solution is to build immigration enforcement institutions that actually work: institutions with transparent criteria, genuine oversight, meaningful accountability, and respect for constitutional limits. Institutions where following the rules produces better outcomes than breaking them, for everyone involved.

This is harder than defunding. It requires sustained legislative effort, difficult tradeoffs, and political courage to defend unpopular constraints on popular enforcement. But it’s the only path toward an immigration enforcement system that both works and deserves to work—one that doesn’t require citizens to choose between complicity and resistance.

The people of Minneapolis aren’t leading. They’re screaming. The question is whether anyone in Washington is willing to build the institutions that would make their desperate resistance unnecessary.