Residents document Border Patrol agents conducting operations in Kenner, Louisiana, near New Orleans, December 6, 2025 © Adam Gray/AFP/Getty Images For months, it seemed no one here in New Orleans was sleeping well. Every now and again, the president would fixate on our city, threatening to send in troops to “clean it up.” Then he’d back off. Long before Minneapolis, with its broad-daylight slayings of American civilians, the worst-case scenarios had yet to materialize. Macabre possibilities haunted us at night, Piranesian visions of dungeons and interrogation chambers. Just after Labor Day, seated by his gilded fireplace, President Trump breezily addressed the press: “We’re making a determination now,” he said. “Do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in?” In the end, he chose Chicago and launched Operation Midway Blitz—a winking reference to either the Bears’ defensive line or Hitler’s bombardment of London. Maybe both. The Windy City’s misfortune was the Crescent City’s reprieve. But our respite proved short-lived. The week before Thanksgiving, leaked Department of Homeland Security documents disclosed that 250 Border Patrol agents would soon be on their way to New Orleans to supplement locally based ICE officers. The documents outlined a two-month-long crackdown aimed at making five thousand arrests. Accompanying the masked troops would be ample matériel: thousands of pounds of tear gas and pepper-spray balls—what the DHS called “less lethal” munitions—to deploy against the activists expected to oppose the occupation. Forces were scheduled to arrive in early December, as the Chicagoland deployment was winding down. According to the leaked plans, the Louisiana mission would be called Operation Swamp Sweep: Operation SS. Allegedly, we were being targeted because of New Orleans’s status as one of the country’s eighteen sanctuary cities. This sounded dubious. With more than three quarters of its residents born in-state, Louisiana was low on migrants from the United States, let alone foreign countries. Was it retaliation for the city’s daring to elect a Mexican-born Democrat, Helena Moreno, as mayor that fall? Or did the president enjoy the prospect of taking on a blue city in a red state, where Landry, a Republican (now also the U.S. special envoy to Greenland), would have the feds’ back? Or was it just a manifestation of Trump’s petulant grudge against the city where his plans to build a seventy-story hotel and condominium building, announced the day before Hurricane Katrina struck, had imploded over a decade ago? In late November, I asked my friend Willem, who teaches social studies at a middle school with a large Latino population, what I might do to help.1 His school was expecting many of its students to shelter in place with their families for the duration of the deployment, under the protective canopy of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure. Willem suggested that I sign up to deliver meals. I was impressed that the community had a food-delivery system ready to go, but I wanted to do something confrontational, like trail ICE agents around town and loudly assert my First Amendment right to yell at masked goons. He had no leads on that, so I duly filled out an online form to volunteer time delivering meals. But as my access to a car was severely limited on weekdays, I suspected that I wouldn’t be a prime candidate. I never heard back. I took some guilty solace in assuming that federal sweeps would primarily target New Orleans’s suburbs, where most of the region’s Latino population lives, far from my urban neighborhood. But a raid on the first day of the operation, now rechristened Catahoula Crunch, after the state’s official dog, suggested otherwise. At ten-thirty on the morning of Wednesday, December 3, Border Patrol agents descended on the parking lot of my local Lowe’s. I’d shopped there innumerable times for mundane home-improvement projects, and now there it was on the national news, brimming with masked men toting firearms. Later that day, Gregory Bovino was spotted on Williams Boulevard, the main commercial strip in Kenner, the city’s most heavily Latino suburb. Then the commander at large of the Border Patrol, Bovino was already infamous from his starring role in deployments in Los Angeles and Chicago. With his tough talk, squeaky voice, diminutive stature, and penchant for fascist fashion, he was a roving, live-action crisis of masculinity—a perfect avatar of the second Trump Administration. For New Orleans’s Latino residents, his presence was terrifying. At Willem’s school, attendance cratered. Many locals, whatever their immigration status, hunkered down at home to avoid encountering well-armed, poorly trained federal agents. At a friend’s office, an American-born Latina colleague had begun commuting to work with her passport. To protect employees and customers, some Latino-owned businesses had closed shop the week before the surge. As the agents arrived, restaurateurs who’d kept their establishments open asked their non-Latino customers—who were less likely to be pulled over by immigration agents in nakedly discriminatory “Kavanaugh stops”—to dine out in support. I picked a Mexican restaurant in River Ridge, a working-class suburb hard up against the Mississippi, calling ahead to make sure it was open. On the drive out, the streets of New Orleans were barren. The weather was unusually chilly and dreary, as if nature itself were in revolt against the Border Patrol. When I arrived at the restaurant, I found the windows dark and the parking lot deserted. The entrance was locked, but I knocked anyway, and soon a waiter peered through the fogged-over glass. He cracked the door, let me in, then promptly shut and relocked it. From the looks of the kitchen, the restaurant seemed to be doing some delivery business, but the dining room was completely empty. The bright, cheery room, decorated with technicolor serapes and paintings of idyllic tropical-village scenes, felt almost like a taunt. The waiter seemed to be struggling to muster a sense of normalcy; I avoided mentioning what we were surely both mulling. As I ate my chile relleno, I struggled to reckon with how things had gotten so bad so fast—in New Orleans, in America. It felt like dining in a police state—worse, in some ways. Reporting years ago in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, before the civil war, I counted on the warmth of the cafés. The consolation of an evening mint tea and hookah was precious to those stalked by fear all day. Tonight, as I picked at a basket of tortilla chips, there was no such relief. After paying at the counter, I dropped some cash into the tip jar. The waiter accompanied me to the door, peering through the glass to scan for agents before unlocking it to let me out. As I headed into the night, I heard the lock click behind me. Over their first eight days in Louisiana, federal immigration agents arrested 250 people. The raids appeared to be wildly unsystematic. More than 90 percent of those detained had no criminal record. The particular locations that were hit sounded as if the Border Patrol had taken tips from racist jokes overheard at a middle school: on December 9, the feds raided an actual taco truck in Livingston Parish and detained two people. Local Democratic politicians were strangely quiescent, despite a pre–Catahoula Crunch poll showing that nearly 80 percent of New Orleans residents opposed the deployment. On the first day of the operation, Moreno requested that agents remove their masks and start focusing on criminals, but stopped short of asking them to leave. The following day, the city’s Democratic congressman, Troy Carter, sent a letter to Bovino requesting federal transparency, due-process protections, and “humanitarian” enforcements, to “ensur[e] that Operation Catahoula Crunch proceeds in a manner worthy of the people of New Orleans.” The New Orleans City Council—all Democrats—did little beyond posting “Know Your Rights” information online in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese to inform residents that, under the Fourth Amendment, they had a right to remain safely in their homes unless federal agents presented them with a warrant signed by a judge. The council, astonishingly, also instructed every adult U.S. citizen in the city to “carry your papers with you at all times.” Border Patrol agents detain the driver of a vehicle after breaking his window in Kenner, December 4, 2025 © Madison Thorn/Anadolu/Getty Images Even as activists smarted over the capitulation of the city’s Democratic establishment, they were well prepared for this moment. That first week, activists canvassed businesses in Latino neighborhoods, offering bilingual printouts reading everyone is welcome here, except ice. (The posters, soon ubiquitous, specified that nonpublic areas—offices, kitchens, break rooms—were not open to inspection without a warrant.) Shortly thereafter, an activist invited me to join a neighborhood ICE-watch group called Ojos—“eyes” in Spanish. All it took was attending a ninety-minute training session that the group was holding that weekend. On Saturday, I biked over to an Episcopal church in my neighborhood to join up. Seated in the pews, we were a diverse assemblage of races, ages, and countries of origin. A pair of organizers stood up front and began a tag-team presentation. Aaron, a lanky public defender and former college football kicker, led off. “What can we do constitutionally to record the agents and alert our neighbors?” he asked, the low wintertime sun streaming in through a stained-glass window. His sidekick, Rob, a nationally touring musician with a voluminous mane of dark frizz, provided the answer: “It’s always legal to film law enforcement in public spaces, even though they really don’t like to be documented.” Aaron noted that it would, however, be a crime to impede an officer. A simple rule could keep us safe, both legally and physically: “Don’t be somewhere an officer can touch you. And don’t touch an officer.” In some respects, New Orleans was unusually well equipped to counter a Border Patrol deployment. The local immigrant community first began organizing after Hurricane Katrina, most often to confront shady building contractors who were stiffing their undocumented employees. These efforts increased amid the intensified immigration enforcement of the first Trump Administration, and now they were scaling up once again. Last summer, when police departments in New Orleans’s suburban parishes, which had long collaborated with ICE, began setting up traffic checkpoints in Latino neighborhoods, documented community members soon found themselves thrust into activist roles. Alejandra, a Spanish-language radio DJ who had for years posted community events, news, and real-time weather alerts on her Facebook page, Explosion Latina NOLA, was now helping relatives of ICE’s captives navigate its detainee database. The creator of Ojos, for her part, was a hotel bartender named Rachel. As she explained to me, the group operated on a remarkably simple principle: “Freedom of speech allows us to say, ‘I see ICE here.’ ” Aaron emphasized that the key to good reporting was precision. “We’d never just post, ‘ICE is on Chef Menteur,’ ” he said, referring to Chef Menteur Highway, which extends for nearly three miles through Central American and Southeast Asian enclaves. A post that vague would terrify undocumented community members without providing actionable information. Specifying the exact intersection where federal agents are spotted, the exact time they’re seen, and what time they leave, on the other hand, could enable undocumented residents to make informed decisions about whether to venture from their homes to go to the grocery store, head to a doctor’s appointment, or leave for work. Rob explained that, in the Ojos WhatsApp chat, possible sightings are first marked “investigando” (“investigating”); if and when it becomes clear that immigration enforcement is actually occurring, “confirmado” (“confirmed”); and then, once agents have left, “despejado” (“all clear”). Aaron also offered tips on identifying the unmarked vehicles favored by ICE and the Border Patrol. The agents work in pairs, so there’s typically someone riding shotgun. Most agents, he said, drive large, late-model American-made SUVs like Ford Expeditions and Chevy Suburbans, with deeply tinted windows. (The Buy American Act requires federal agencies to purchase vehicles manufactured in the United States.) Of course, in Louisiana, with its cheap, abundant, and locally refined gasoline, many civilians drive these behemoths, too, so at school pickups, organizers asked parents to roll their windows down and blast music, something that joyless agents would never do. Once a sighting is confirmed, Ojos leaders upload unmarked cars’ license-plate numbers to a national, bilingual database at ICEcheck.org. Activists told me that plates moved with the agents—tags identified during an earlier deployment in North Carolina were now being spotted in Louisiana. Immigration agents, seemingly aware that their plates were being tracked, took to installing license-plate covers that made them difficult to read and photograph—or to driving with no plates at all. (Plate covers are illegal in Louisiana and many other states; plateless driving is illegal nationwide.) Faced with a well-organized community, agents’ attempts at anonymity were useless. Their “unmarked” cars weren’t fooling anyone. Before leaving the church that day, Aaron and Rob had us rehearse how we might protect a school bus stop from an immigration raid. This was the type of everyday resistance that parents at Willem’s school had been mounting for weeks. I opted to play an ICE agent and found myself genuinely flustered when those role-playing the parents refused to answer my stone-faced queries about their immigration status and which hospital they were born in. There was little I could legally do in response. When the training at the church wrapped up, we each scanned a QR code to be added as ICE watchers on the WhatsApp chat. I was assigned to Ojos Alerts 2, since the original Ojos Alerts was already full. (WhatsApp caps its group chats at 1,024 members.) Just over two weeks into the occupation, New Orleans already had more than 1,000 civilians watching the Border Patrol and ICE, in a modest-size metro area of one million people. And as the community mobilized, the pace of arrests began to slow. During the second week of the occupation, federal immigration agents arrested 120 individuals, half the number of migrants they’d arrested the week before. Over the holiday season, a cousin of mine went out West to visit his parents, leaving me his car, an elderly Hyundai pushing 175,000 miles that is literally held together with tape. Finally able to deliver food, I joined a WhatsApp group chat ca