By admin 
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.
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This January, a neighbor texted me a video, along with a warning to avoid our neighborhood. The video showed dozens of people following a black SUV past my home in Minneapolis, blowing whistles and shouting. It was not quite a protest chant, but a verbal alarm for the neighborhood. People came to windows, porches, and icy sidewalks in below-freezing weather because someone had seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the vehicle, and the new ground rule was simple: None of our neighbors should be taken by ICE without witnesses.
This scene captured a common neighborhood response during Operation Metro Surge. There were whistles, Signal chats, legal observers, carpools, rent funds, and grocery deliveries. Warnings passed from block to block, orally and digitally. Some parents kept children home; other children insisted that their parents stay home instead. Residents relayed when not to drive, when not to return, when to stay inside, and when to come out in force.
My experience was not exceptional, and that was the point. The surge made public safety a daily practice for many residents. None of it sounded like law in a traditional register. Rather, it was accompaniment: feeding, sheltering, driving, watching, and warning so no one had to move in isolation. What we saw in Minneapolis this past winter was, among other extraordinary things, popular constitutionalism in action.
Popular constitutionalism usually names the idea that constitutional meaning is not the province of courts alone. Movements argue about the Constitution, organize around it, and sometimes make claims powerful enough that courts later recognize them as law. Operation Metro Surge belongs to that tradition, but at a more immediate and less familiar level. Residents were not waiting for judicial recognition. They were not claiming the state’s police power for themselves but acting as though they already had a legitimate claim to ensuring the entire community’s safety.
The state of Minnesota translated these safety claims into a federal lawsuit. Along with Minneapolis and St. Paul, it challenged Operation Metro Surge by arguing that the federal government had disrupted schools, businesses, emergency services, municipal resources, streets, and the trust on which local governance depends. invoked Minnesota’s “inviolable sovereign authority” and its duty to ensure the “health, education, and safety” of residents. Translated into constitutional terms, Minnesota argued that the surge violated federalist principles by invading the state’s reserved police powers: the broad authority to govern public health, safety, welfare, and order.
That claim translated the fear and disruption of the surge into a constitutional injury that courts could recognize. Yet in Minneapolis, that translation carried its own history. This is the city where police murdered George Floyd, and where the resulting uprising remade the national vocabulary of police violence. Here, the promise that local law enforcement keeps people safe is often hard for residents to take at face value. For many in the city, the problem posed by Operation Metro Surge was not simply whether federal agents had displaced local police. It was that public safety had to be routed through either federal or state policing for the claim to become legible. The whistles and the mutual aid networks demonstrated that it did not.
Recent reporting on the Minneapolis Police Department’s response to the surge has sharpened this point. Residents called for help or to report masked agents, guns pointed at protestors, the unrestrained use of chemical munitions, and what looked like kidnappings in the street. The city spent tens of millions in police overtime and standby during the surge, while police rarely responded directly to immigration-related emergency calls. Much of the overtime money the department spent went instead toward preparing for unrest, monitoring protests and vigils, guarding hotels housing federal agents, and managing the public response to federal violence. Local police power did not simply fail to protect residents from federal enforcement—it sought to manage and limit residents’ response to that violence.
Resident safety practices are not alien to constitutional history. Long before modern professional police forces, public order depended on watches, constables, alarms, and forms of compelled or expected community response. The old common-law “hue and cry” is not a model to romanticize; it could be coercive, punitive, and exclusionary. But it does show that the state’s current monopoly over the legal meaning of public safety is not natural.
Residents’ safety practices during Operation Metro Surge did not revive a bygone era, but exposed the contingency of the present one: the modern assumption that public safety becomes legally cognizable only when the state performs it. The practices in this period changed as enforcement changed. A warning system would form around one pattern of ICE activity, and then the pattern would change. A route became dangerous, then known, then avoided. A license plate circulated on chat networks, and agents later swapped it out. Each day, people adjusted to federal movement, ICE and Customs and Border Protection adjusted to being watched, and people adjusted again.
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This was not insurgency. It was the refusal of pacification. As policing theorist Mark Neocleous has argued, pacification is the production of order by the very forces that create the danger they claim to manage. It makes official violence look calm and inevitable while popular response is made to look like disorder. Operation Metro Surge was announced as a law enforcement campaign, but many residents experienced it as an effort to pacify the city through fear and overwhelming force.
Residents refused to play along. The struggle over public safety became concrete when residents began placing makeshift barricades in the streets to slow ICE vehicles. They were formed with cones, shipping pallets, chairs, trash bins, or even neighbors inside a traffic circle. These were small and temporary impediments, but they worked well enough to make a vehicle pause, and to give residents time to check its license plate against a database, see who was inside, and record and relay the information.
The city described the barricades through the language of safety as well. When makeshift roadblocks appeared, Minneapolis urged residents to stop erecting them, citing the need for emergency access, fire response, and roadways open for all. City workers cleared them as quickly as they appeared. Of course, these concerns were real. A blocked street can delay an ambulance or endanger someone whose emergency has nothing to do with immigration enforcement.
But the city’s response to the barricades did not settle the public safety question. It revealed an assumption in law about who may act in the name of safety. Police may close roads, establish perimeters, kettle crowds, redirect traffic, block movement, and call those acts public order. Residents doing the same acquire different labels: obstruction, disorder, interference, and even conspiracy. Put differently, law does not begin by asking what the barricade does. It first asks who built it. The state may control movement because it bears the police power, and it bears the police power because it is the state. Once that axiom is treated as constitutional common sense, public safety appears already on the side of the enforcement vehicle.
This is where Minnesota’s lawsuit and Minneapolis residents’ barricade response pulled against each other. In court, the state and cities argued that Operation Metro Surge had invaded state and municipal authority. In the street, the city sought to reclaim that authority from residents. Public safety could be local rather than federal, but still institutional rather than popular. The popular response to Operation Metro Surge did not resolve that tension by choosing the city over the federal government. It rejected the assumption that both shared: that public safety must remain an institutional monopoly.
Of course, popular claims to community safety can become dangerous. They have justified lynching; border vigilantism; racial, gendered, and xenophobic exclusion; neighborhood surveillance; and mob violence. That history is why contesting the constitutional allocation of public safety cannot mean giving private people authority to govern vulnerable people.
The question is not whether state power or popular power is always safer. Neither is. The harder question is what each is doing. What power is being exercised, against whom, by what means, and in response to what danger? In Minneapolis, residents perceived the danger not as the vulnerable populations being stopped, but as armed federal power. The means they deployed were not violent resistance, but warning, watching, accompanying, documenting, delaying, material support, and refusing isolation.
That is the popular constitutional contest the whistles, warnings, carpools, legal observers, and barricades made visible. Federal agents claimed public safety by conducting dragnet stops. Local officials claimed public safety by managing the response. Residents claimed public safety by slowing that movement and making enforcement visible. Their practices showed that public safety cannot be measured only by who has legal authority to act in its name. Safety “by the people, for the people” then, is not private policing or blind faith in the crowd. It is the insistence that public safety be judged by the people who must live with its consequences.
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