When asked about consequences for the ICE agent who killed Joan Durán Guerrero, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullins inadvertently articulated the Administration’s new strategy for their mass deportation machine.
Doubling down on the deadly violence and chaos, Secretary Mullins appeared to be more concerned about public scrutiny of ICE actions than their deadly violence against our neighbors: “We’re turning up the heat on the streets… What I’m trying to do is remove us from the headlines every single day.”
More violence, chaos, and dehumanization but kept in the shadows without public accountability.
A reversal from the boisterous strategy, started in May of 2025 and led by Gregory Bovino, which sought to sensationally intimidate whole neighborhoods at once. The Bovino Strategy was stopped by collective community responses, as neighbors organized with neighbors across the county to expose ICE’s brutal tactics, forcing a shift in tactics.
The same ICE brutality and cruelty that drew national outrage hasn’t stopped, but their new strategy is just to not get caught on camera. They have moved from the named surges of “Midway Bitz,” “Operation Buckeye,” and “Catahoula Crunch” to the 15-minute traffic stop.
Rounding up more of our neighbors in less visible ways is designed to more quietly advance a white nationalist vision that seeks to purge our neighbors from public life and slowly erode all of our rights and freedoms.
We’re calling this the shadow surge. And it’s showing up in three specific ways.
To avoid public scrutiny and accountability, the government’s tactics moved to where fewer cameras are rolling: the morning commute, the courthouse, and the parking lot. Secretary Mullins signaled the shift in tactics, saying, “We are going to take a different approach that can be more effective and less public-facing.”
Away from the cameras, the focus is about putting up numbers. ICE is pushing for averages of more than 2,000 arrests a day nationwide — nearly double the same point last year. This aggressive push for numbers is designed for harassment, racial profiling, and violence. The deadly consequences are made horrifically clear in the recent killings in Texas and Maine, where both victims shot by ICE were not actually ICE’s intended targets.
New reporting finds use of force is the “default” for most ICE interactions. To operate in the shadows away from community members’ cell phone cameras with increasing scale, ICE has turned to forced traffic stops. Not a typical speeding ticket interaction, ICE instead converges on a car in aggressive and quick interactions. Snatching neighbors on their way to work allows ICE to avoid pesky delays from due process and signed warrants. Despite their demonstrated deadly consequences, the ability to avoid due process and public accountability makes this attractive as a shadow surge tactic. Which is likely why the President was so insistent on the continued use of these ICE traffic stops after an initial announcement that they would be paused.
The erosion of due process and the deadly violence is a feature, not a bug, of the mass deportation machine. ICE’s shadow surge tactics are only furthering these authoritarian advances.
2. The proliferation of 287(g) agreements – show-me-your-papers traffic stops
ICE is also trying to hide behind local police, turning them into the front-line show-me-your-papers force with 287(g) agreements. As of this writing, there are 2,179 active agreements — up from roughly 135 when this Administration took office. A growth of over 1,470% in barely a year. According to the ACLU, at least 77.2 million people — nearly a third of the country — now live in a county with one of these show-me-you-papers agreements, where local police have been deputized to act as immigration agents. The effect: the officer who responds to a car accident, a noise complaint, or a welfare check can now double as a deportation agent.
This isn’t incidental. FWD.us estimates ICE could funnel between $1.4 and $2 billion to local agencies in 2026 alone to entice their cooperation, on top of the $137 million already flowing. Providing financial incentive to local law enforcement officers to hunt down our immigrant neighbors.
The expansion of these agreements is essential to their strategy as Sec. Mullins said, “I would love to see ICE become a transport more than the front line. If we get back ... into just simply working with law enforcement, we’re going to them, and we’re picking up these criminals from their jail.”
This part of the shadow surge is important for two reasons. (1) Arrests look like ordinary traffic stops instead of raids, making it much more difficult to document the roundup of our neighbors. (2) Co-opting local police in this way also overcomes the massive logistical challenge of disappearing thousands of our neighbors on a daily basis.
3. Detention without due process — disappearing detainees
Getting picked up is only the start. Once inside, the system is built to make people hard to find and harder to defend. Detainees are often rapidly moved out of state, making contact with family and lawyers difficult and denying constitutionally protected due process rights. A growing number of attorneys argue the transfers interfere with detainees’ access to attorneys and the courts. The typical detainee is now moved at least once, often across state lines and without warning to family or counsel.
The human cost of that is concrete: attorneys report having to refile bond motions 15 to 20 times as their clients get moved from state to state and courts lose jurisdiction each time. Reporting from Capital & Main describes detainees flown to Alaska shackled in a plane’s cargo hold, without seats or bathroom access, and unable to call family or a lawyer for days after landing.
The rise in these so-called “shuffle flights” has coincided with a massive and unprecedented increase in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed in federal courthouses across the country as attorneys scramble to get judges to release detainees held in states far from their homes.
Meanwhile, the living conditions inside detention facilities have continued to deteriorate, with deaths in ICE custody rising. As detention numbers swell, accelerated “mega hearings” mean the process from street to courtroom to removal can move faster than a family can even locate their loved one, let alone mount a defense.
The violence and chaos of the mass deportation machine hasn’t abated. It has just sought the shadows. But neighbors can organize to document and tell the truth about what’s happening in their own communities. A camera undercuts ICE’s version of events. A network of organized neighbors demands the accountability the strategy is built to avoid.
That means doubling down: inviting more people into the block-by-block community defense networks already supporting neighbors in towns and cities across the country. It means telling the story — that the actual source of chaos and violence on our streets is federalized political repression, dressed up as public safety.
Join us to build that response. Join us for an updated ICE Watch training to learn how we can adapt our ICE Watch efforts to expose the violence and harm of the shadow surge, and its erosion of all of our rights and freedoms.
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