What Immigration Enforcement Reveals About American Democracy
By EunSook Lee and Quanita Toffie
February 16, 2026
“People are scared. And if there is nothing you can do, what do we do?”
That is what Mary Niedermeyer, CEO of one our grantee partners, Communities Advancing Prosperity for Immigrants (CAPI) in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, told us when we spoke with her shortly after the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE agents. She had spent the morning on the phone with local police and city officials after noticing ICE agents stationed in the parking lot of the CAPI USA Food Shelf.
What would normally be a busy day was eerily quiet as families who rely on the food shelf stayed away. The mere presence of ICE transformed a place meant for collective care into a threat as families were forced to calculate whether accessing food was worth exposure to the state. At that moment, a community institution no longer felt public, and participation itself no longer felt safe.
This is not a border story, or even primarily an immigration policy story. This is what it looks like when state-sanctioned brutality and violence enter the places where people gather and engage with one another to meet basic needs. These spaces, where people buy groceries, share food, and care for one another, are a cornerstone of democratic society. When they are militarized, free association itself comes under attack.
When Immigration Stops Being Abstract
The brutality of enforcement no longer feels distant or theoretical. From the arrest of children like Liam Conejo Ramos to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE’s actions in Minnesota and across the country have pushed people who once saw immigration as abstract into a direct reckoning. For many Americans, including many who previously supported mass deportations, this is the first time immigration has appeared not as a talking point but as state violence unfolding in familiar settings. Images now circulate of masked federal agents tackling people in school parking lots, grocery stores, gas stations, and food pantries.
The killings of Pretti and Good accelerated this shift. Their deaths disrupted the categories many relied on to justify aggressive enforcement. They forced a confrontation not just with immigration enforcement but with a deeper question: how much state brutality will a democracy tolerate, and against whom?
Immigration has stopped being abstract. It has become a test of democratic life.
For AAPI Communities, These Have Always Been the Stakes
For Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, immigration and refugee policy has never been theoretical. It has shaped families, belonging, and political participation for generations. AAPI communities are majority immigrant and refugee. In Minnesota, where CAPI operates, AAPIs make up roughly 30 percent of the state’s immigrant population. AAPI Civic Engagement Fund supports more than 40 organizations in 21 states, and every one of them has identified immigration enforcement as the most urgent threat to their communities’ ability to participate fully in civic and public life.
AAPI communities have endured exclusion acts, forced displacement, incarceration, and policies that tied belonging to race and perceived loyalty. Immigration policy is where race, law, and power collide most visibly in public space. When enforcement intensifies, AAPI communities recognize not only the risk of deportation, but the warning signs of democratic erosion.
Brutality in the Parking Lot
At CAPI, those warning signs became impossible to ignore. Mary, a Korean adoptee and a U.S. citizen, has begun to carry her passport again. She worries that if ICE sees her Asian face moving between the food shelf and her car, she may need to prove she belongs.
“My whole childhood, I didn’t feel like I belonged,” she said. “As an adult, I found a place and community and a strong sense of belonging, and this administration is taking it away.”
At the food shelf, ICE did not need to make arrests to shut down civil society. Their presence in the parking lot was enough to intimidate people, with and without immigration status, out of participating in the basic democratic act of free association. As ICE leaves Minnesota and sets its sights on other cities, this insidious fear and paranoia stand to affect our right to free associate and gather safely across the country.
When immigration enforcement operates this way, through intimidation and fear, it does more than target undocumented people. It reshapes how entire communities relate to public institutions and teaches people that seeking help carries risk. That free association is no longer guaranteed or protected. This damage is not incidental. It is intentional.
What Happens When Rights Become Conditional
Immigration enforcement does not harm people evenly. When rights and participation become conditional, the consequences fall hardest on those with the least protection and resources to begin with.
Women, low-wage workers, survivors of violence, and people navigating precarious legal status experience enforcement not as a single event, but as a constant threat shaping every decision they make. Fear keeps parents from seeking medical care, reporting abuse, or accessing food and housing support. Families fracture under the weight of uncertainty, with caregiving responsibilities absorbing the economic and emotional fallout when a loved one is detained or deported.
These outcomes are the predictable result of a system that treats rights as privileges to be earned rather than guarantees to be upheld. When due process weakens, it is those already navigating inequality who are pushed first into the shadows. This is why immigration enforcement is such a powerful stress test for democracy – it shows exactly who pays the price when protections become optional.
Criminalization as Strategy
There are more than 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Nearly half have lived here for more than twenty years, and most for at least five. They are parents, workers, caregivers, and neighbors woven into the fabric of their communities.
What many Americans still do not realize is that being undocumented is not a criminal violation. It is a civil one. Yet immigration enforcement increasingly treats undocumented status as synonymous with criminality. This shift is systemic and deliberate. Criminalization creates moral distance which facilitates dehumanization. It allows extraordinary state violence to be framed as necessary enforcement and transforms entire populations into threats that can be detained, deported, or terrorized with minimal public resistance.
Research from UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge makes this clear. While Latinos make up about 60 percent of non-citizens and 71 percent of undocumented immigrants, they account for 92 percent of ICE arrests. Deportations of Asian immigrants have also risen sharply. Arrests have tripled, and nearly all detained AAPI immigrants are transferred repeatedly across facilities, compounding trauma. Even after ICE has physically left a city and the media begins to focus on other issues, its legacy of trauma and forced separation remains.
The same researchers also found that ICE arrest rates are higher in areas where voters supported Donald Trump, revealing enforcement patterns shaped by political geography rather than public safety. When enforcement becomes selective and racialized, due process erodes. Once due process becomes optional for some, it becomes fragile for everyone.
Immigration as a Proxy Fight for Democracy
This is why immigration is not a single-issue fight. It is a proxy for a much larger struggle over democratic norms. Citizenship status or criminal record should not be the focus when someone can be detained, deported, or killed by the state without meaningful accountability. The principle at stake is whether rights and participation are inherent or conditional.
There are two paths forward. One accepts a narrative that divides people into those worthy of protection and those deemed disposable. The other insists that due process, free association, and equal protection must belong to all who live here. If we lose on immigration enforcement policy, we stand to lose the very conditions that make multiracial democracy possible in practice.
Lessons From the Movement
Between us, we have spent decades building immigrant rights and civic engagement infrastructure across communities and states. We have worked in service, organizing, advocacy, and policy change. We have helped win expansions of health coverage for immigrant children, restored SSI for low-income immigrant seniors, and fought for access to education for all.
Those victories mattered not only because of who they helped, but because of how they were won. They were built through multiracial coalitions that understood immigration as a shared struggle rather than a narrow ethnic concern. Immigration policy never affects only one community – the systems that exclude are broad. Resistance must be broader still.
Solidarity in Practice
That understanding of broad solidarity is alive in the organizations we support today. At Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, staff who typically advocate for AAPI communities are now representing immigrants from African nations facing unlawful deportation. In Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, Japanese Americans whose families were incarcerated during World War II patrol neighborhoods and visit detention centers because they recognize history repeating itself. At CAPI, staff serve Hmong, Latino, West African, Afghan, and Somali families side by side.
These AAPI organizations do not differentiate who is in need of aid by ethnicity because the systems harming them do not. When the state draws no clean lines, neither can liberation.
Democratic Fragility and Political Choice
The federal government announced it would end its aggressive operation in Minnesota, but it is far from over for cities across the country. And as the media turns its eye to other stories, ICE’s work and legacy of pain will continue in the shadows, out of the spotlight.
This current crisis has exposed a deeper truth. Many of the Trump administration’s immigration actions are being upheld in court. The laws did not collapse; the norms did.
Research comparing states like California and Texas shows that political choices can either mitigate or magnify harm. Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on institutions choosing to protect people or permitting their terrorization in public.
What Philanthropy Can Do Now
For philanthropy, this moment calls for clarity and commitment rather than panic. Short-term crisis response is not enough. Our grantees are telling us repeatedly that communities need infrastructure that can withstand sustained pressure. That means multi-year commitments and a willingness to believe in the strategic leadership and organizing abilities of local organizers. It means funding general operating support so organizations are stable and resourced enough to respond when ICE appears without warning. It means investing in multiracial organizing that reflects how people actually live and engage with one another.
This is the work of maintaining democratic infrastructure, not responding to a temporary emergency. This is an investment in democracy itself.
Back at the Food Shelf
When Mary asked, “If there is nothing you can do, what do we do?” she was asking whether the community and institutions around her would rise to the moment.
We can refuse to accept a democracy that terrorizes some while protecting others. We can build a sustained, multiracial movement that makes participation, safety, and rights real in everyday life.
Because when ICE shows up at the food shelf, whether in Minnesota or the next stop on their campaign of fear, it is not just about immigration. It is about all of us.