This is part of Amicus and Slate’s “By the People” series, which explores how the American people can reclaim the Constitution—and the law—from this monarchical Supreme Court.

When Tippy Amundson was in middle school, she read the diary of a teenager hiding from the secret police. “Terrible things are happening outside,” it read. “Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Amundson tried to imagine what she would do if she lived during such terrible times.

I would totally hide Anne Frank, she reasoned. But when would you ever have the opportunity to do that? This is a civilized world we live in now. This is America. A quarter century later, Amundson, now a 39-year-old travel agent and former kindergarten teacher, received a call from her 13-year-old neighbor. He asked if he could hide in her house if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers chased him home from his bus stop. It was then she knew that the time had come.

Amundson’s teenage neighbor had been considering what he might do if he found himself in ICE’s crosshairs. His parents didn’t want him to go to school; they themselves were afraid to go to work. Every day when he got off the bus, he looked around for unmarked cars filled with masked agents wearing body armor and carrying guns, afraid that they might ask him for his papers or put him in their SUVs and drive away. As he walked up to the door, he checked over his shoulders to see if he was being watched, and he hoped his parents would still be waiting for him inside. Amundson agreed to watch the bus stop when he got home and to hide him if necessary. Their story, which only got more dramatic from there, is a prime example of how the people of Minneapolis responded to unprecedented state-sanctioned lawlessness: They mobilized en masse to protect their neighbors.

Early in Donald Trump’s second term, the White House issued mandates of ICE and Border Patrol to arrest 3,000 people a day. Lawmakers were denied entry when they tried to perform their mandated oversight duties at immigrant detention facilities. ICE’s mission broadened to police those opposed to the president. The Department of Homeland Security began to surveil social media posts of Trump’s political opponents, using facial recognition software to create “terrorist” databases of peaceful protesters and following the demonstrators to their houses, sometimes calling them by name. ICE and Border Patrol agents, in masks and unwilling to identify themselves, were empowered by the Supreme Court to demand the papers of people because of their accent, their job, or simply their “apparent race or ethnicity.”

In short, according to Lee Morgenbesser, who studies past and present authoritarian regimes and secret police, ICE meets the criteria for a secret police force.

Secret police, or something very near that description, swept through Chicago from September to December 2025. Senior Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, with masked and militarized federal officers, waged a monthslong rampage that saw protesters, first responders, and children tear-gassed, journalists arrested, citizens abducted and shot, and a man killed.

It was then that the Trump administration settled its gaze on Minneapolis. A haven for refugees fleeing a civil war in the late ’90s, Minnesota is home to some 80,000 people of Somali descent, most of whom are citizens. “I don’t want them in this country, to be honest with you,” Trump said to his Cabinet and reporters about Americans of Somali descent. “We’re at a tipping point. I don’t know if people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage to our country.”

On Dec. 2, federal police kidnapped a Metro Transit bus driver on his way to work because he was Somali. The officers unlawfully detained him (or, more accurately, trafficked him) in three different states, and he wouldn’t see his family again for a month. So began Operation Metro Surge, an invasion whose name was inspired by the war on terror and which was conceived to punish a place where Trump is deeply unpopular. “THE........

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