Do Mass Protests Change Federal Policy? What Research Shows

Protesters gathered outside federal buildings across the United States over a single weekend in late January, with tens of thousands protesting federal immigration enforcement operations and demanding the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This “National Shutdown,” as organizers branded it, combined street protests with work stoppages, school walkouts, and business closures in a massive, organized peaceful protest against federal policy.

This action represented the largest single-day mobilization against immigration enforcement in contemporary American history. Yet whether such mass protest activity can change federal policy remains an open question that movement participants, policymakers, and scholars continue to debate.

The Crisis That Sparked a Movement

The chain of events began on January 7, when federal agents killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis. ICE agent Jonathan Ross approached Good’s vehicle and fired three shots at her departing car, striking her in the chest, forearm, and head. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office ruled her death a homicide.

Seventeen days later, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, also in Minneapolis. Video footage showed Pretti complying with commands when federal agents deployed pepper spray and fired multiple shots into his body in the Whittier neighborhood near his home. His death was also ruled a homicide by medical examiners.

These killings occurred within the context of Operation Metro Surge, a massive federal deployment of roughly 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents to the Twin Cities beginning in December 2025. The stated purpose was to investigate fraud, though critics argued the operation was federal punishment against Minnesota for its sanctuary policies.

On January 23, more than 50,000 people marched through downtown Minneapolis in subzero temperatures. That morning, roughly 100 clergy members conducted a sit-in at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, kneeling in prayer and civil disobedience while approximately 1,000 additional protesters joined the airport action.

The afternoon saw a massive rally at the Target Center sports arena, which filled nearly all 20,000 seats with union workers, community members, and faith leaders. Presidents of major unions including the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Communications Workers of America spoke to the assembled crowd.

One week later, on January 30 and into January 31, protests escalated to a nationwide scale. More than 300 anti-ICE protests occurred simultaneously throughout the United States. Demonstrations took place in Minneapolis, New York, Washington D.C., Tucson, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities. Thousands participated in a general strike, with organizers urging people to refrain from work, school, and shopping.

Nearly 700 small businesses and cultural institutions closed in solidarity in the Twin Cities alone. Closures occurred in coffee shops, bookstores, tattoo parlors, and independent retailers from Long Beach to Portland, Oregon. Starbucks Workers United took six company locations on unfair-labor-practice strikes combining labor action with anti-ICE demands.

Federal law enforcement and police responded with escalation in several cities. In Los Angeles, where hundreds of protesters assembled outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, federal authorities deployed tear gas into the crowd. In Portland, protesters attempted to block facility entrances as federal authorities issued dispersal orders and deployed chemical irritants. Multiple protesters reported being struck by less-lethal projectiles, pepper spray, and pepper balls at close range.

Coalition Structure and Organizing Methods

This action represented a broad coalition spanning labor unions, immigrant rights organizations, faith communities, student groups, and activist networks. The organizational diversity and geographic scale suggested that multiple pre-existing networks had worked together rather than a single top-down command structure.

Labor unions provided resources and protected workers from being fired. The Service Employees International Union, representing nearly two million members, played a central role. The American Federation of Teachers, representing 1.7 million educators, participated alongside state and local affiliates. The Oregon Nurses Association brought healthcare worker perspectives and networks.

These institutional unions provided legal protections through union support, allowing workers to participate without immediate employment risk by framing their absence as safety concerns. As one UNITE HERE Local 17 steward explained: “I’m not scared of the cold. I’m more scared of ICE right now. They’ve been abducting a lot of my co-workers.”

Immigrant rights organizations provided the political framework and institutional continuity. The New York Immigrant Coalition organized protests and infrastructure in New York City. Local groups like “ICE Out of Alexandria” brought geographic specificity. These organizations had been working against ICE for years before these events, providing the ideas and plans upon which the rapid response could build.

Faith communities participated with visibility around civil disobedience and moral witness. The 100 clergy members conducting a sit-in at the Minneapolis airport represented a direct use of religious authority and the sanctuary tradition stretching back to the 1980s asylum movement. This faith participation provided both moral legitimacy and protection from immediate police violence, as law enforcement typically exercises greater restraint with visible clergy.

Student organizations led high school and college walkouts in multiple cities. Sunrise Movement, known for climate activism, brought youth organizing expertise and networks. Indivisible chapters, developed during the 2017-2018 resistance to Trump’s first term, activated their local membership.

The coalition coordinated 300+ simultaneous protests in fifty states despite lacking apparent unified leadership or clear funding sources. Activists utilized digital communication platforms, phone trees, email lists, and social media to coordinate the action.

Policy Outcomes and Government Response

The coalition articulated three core demands: immediate withdrawal of the 3,000 federal agents from Minnesota; criminal prosecution of ICE and Border Patrol officers responsible for killing Renée Good and Alex Pretti; and the dismantling of ICE as a federal institution.

Partial Federal Withdrawal

On February 4—five days after the peak action—Border Czar Tom Homan announced that approximately 700 officers would be withdrawn from Minneapolis. This reduced the total deployment from roughly 3,000 to about 2,000 agents. Homan framed this drawdown as a strategic move rather than giving in to protest pressure, citing increased cooperation from local law enforcement.

The administration presented the remaining 2,000 agents as necessary to continue the mission, rejecting the demand for complete withdrawal. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz both characterized the partial drawdown as “a step in the right direction” but insufficient, emphasizing that Operation Metro Surge needed to end entirely.

No Criminal Charges Filed

The Department of Justice opened federal civil rights investigations into both the Good and Pretti shootings. However, no criminal charges were filed against the officers involved in either killing as of early February.

A House Democratic report accused the Trump administration of attempting to cover up the killings rather than hold officers accountable. The report concluded that “the Trump Administration’s lies about the killings cannot cover up what the American people saw with their own eyes.”

The administration’s initial defense of the shootings shifted slightly after public backlash. Officials had called both victims “terrorists” and “assassins,” but Trump later acknowledged that the killings “should not have happened” while remaining noncommittal on whether they were justified.

Shifting Public Opinion on ICE

A poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov found that 46 percent of Americans supported dismantling ICE while 43 percent opposed—a dramatic shift from earlier polling. A Quinnipiac poll released in early February found that 63 percent of Americans disapproved of how ICE was enforcing laws.

Among specific demographic groups, support for dismantling the agency reached 74 percent among Democrats, 55 percent among Hispanic Americans, and 53 percent among those aged 18-34. Support also reached 47 percent of white women and 55 percent of Hispanic Americans, suggesting the movement had reached beyond the usual liberal supporters.

This public opinion shift represented a significant achievement for movement messaging, yet it didn’t translate into congressional action to dismantle the agency.

Body Cameras and Accountability Measures

Within days of the demonstrations, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that all ICE and CBP officers in Minneapolis would be immediately issued body-worn cameras. This expanded a program being deployed as funding became available.

Over 90 percent of Americans supported mandatory body cameras for ICE agents in polling conducted after the protests. However, civil rights experts noted that body cameras alone wouldn’t ensure accountability without rules requiring cameras to be turned on and footage kept, public access, and disciplinary consequences for non-compliance.

Media Coverage and Political Pressure

The killings of Good and Pretti became major stories, with 83 percent of Americans surveyed reporting they had seen, read, or heard news about the fatal shootings.

A Quinnipiac poll found that 58 percent of voters believed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should be removed from her position. Newsweek polling showed that majorities of Americans viewed the response by ICE to protests as more violent than the protesters themselves.

Historical Parallels

The 2006 Immigrant Rights Protests

The most direct historical parallel is the 2006 immigrant rights protests, when millions of immigrants and their allies took to the streets in response to proposed restrictive legislation. The largest day of protest occurred on April 10, 2006, when an estimated 350,000 to 500,000 people demonstrated in Dallas alone, with hundreds of thousands more gathering in 102 other cities.

On May 1, 2006—a date chosen to honor workers—activists organized what they called the “Great American Boycott” or “Day Without Immigrants.” Immigrants and their allies refrained from work, school, and shopping to demonstrate their economic significance. This framework closely paralleled the 2026 National Shutdown strategy.

Yet the 2006 movement, despite its scale, failed to achieve its primary objective. While the restrictive HR 4437 passed the House, it failed in the Senate, and the movement’s decline was rapid after May 2006. Rather than producing reform with a pathway to legalization, the post-2006 period witnessed escalated action, including intensified ICE raids.

Within a few years of the 2006 protests, more than 300,000 immigrants were deported annually—100,000 more than in 2005, the year before the protests. Participants experienced rapid demobilization. Scholars attributed this to both the failure to achieve legislative victory and increased retaliation against the undocumented participants who had exposed themselves through public protest.

The Memphis Sanitation Strike

Another historical parallel is the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, which activists invoked. On February 1, 1968, two Black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death when a garbage truck compactor malfunctioned. The city initially refused to recognize this as work-related.

The two workers’ deaths catalyzed a strike by roughly 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers who had long endured low wages, exposure to rotting garbage, and systematic racial discrimination. The strikers carried signs reading “I Am a Man,” with the “Am” underlined—a simple assertion of human dignity that became iconic.

The strike stretched on for weeks with massive civic disruption—trash accumulated on city streets—yet the Memphis mayor refused to meet the strikers’ demands and instead sent police with clubs and mace. The strike was won after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s intervention and assassination. Public pressure and labor solidarity forced the city to recognize the workers’ union, raise wages, and provide safer working conditions.

The Memphis strike illustrated that work disruption by workers with institutional protections could force policy change, and that worker dignity claims could transcend narrow interests into moral issues everyone cared about.

Academic Research on Protest Effectiveness

A foundational study by Susan Olzak, published in the American Sociological Review, examined the impact of protests against police brutality on the establishment of civilian review boards and on police use of force in 170 cities between 1990 and 2018.

Olzak’s research found that protests significantly increased the likelihood that cities would establish civilian review boards with meaningful power. Protests were also associated with measurable reductions in officer-involved fatalities among communities of color. Olzak identified three mechanisms through which protest facilitates change: showing that an issue matters and expanding awareness that a problem requires a solution; empowering residents in disadvantaged communities and raising community cohesion; and creating threats to elites, raising political and material costs that encourage concessions.

“Because protest threatens to raise political and material costs to elites, protest increases the chance that elites will make concessions to protesters’ demands,” Olzak concluded. However, she also noted that such policy reforms remain weakly established and often lack support of police departments and elite leadership, limiting their implementation and effectiveness.

Erica Chenoweth’s research on civil resistance offers another framework. In her analysis of violent versus nonviolent campaigns seeking big, sweeping political goals, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded roughly twice as often as violent ones. Chenoweth attributed nonviolent movements’ greater success to their ability to get more different kinds of people involved, their ability to win over powerful people, and their ability to withstand government crackdowns.

Chenoweth identified what she termed the “3.5 percent rule”. She found that when nonviolent campaigns achieved participation from roughly 3.5 percent of a population at their peak, they were highly likely to succeed in achieving their stated goals. This action reached perhaps 0.1-0.2 percent of the U.S. population in peak demonstrations, suggesting it remained well below levels needed for major change.

However, Chenoweth emphasized that her rule should be understood as a rule of thumb rather than an iron law. She noted that long-running campaigns with wide public support could succeed even without reaching the 3.5 percent threshold.

Strategic Options for Movement Advancement

Sustained Encampments and Facility Occupation

The 2018 Occupy ICE encampments in Portland, Seattle, and other cities maintained 24-hour blockades of ICE facilities for several weeks. They disrupted activities and generated attention. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York created sustained physical space for political education, strategic planning, and relationship-building that transformed many participants’ political consciousness.

Sustained occupation would create continuous pressure on ICE while providing physical space to build alternative institutions. Community kitchens, medical clinics, and legal support could show what communities without ICE would be like. Multi-week encampments would exhaust law enforcement resources and generate daily media coverage, maintaining political pressure that one-time protests can’t sustain.

The difficulty: Federal authorities could invoke laws against obstruction of federal property or trespass more aggressively than against street protestors, putting participants at legal risk. Physical encampments in winter conditions proved challenging for protesters and would require significant logistical infrastructure including heated shelters, medical support, and security protocols.

Work Stoppages by Federal Employees

During the 1968 Memphis strike, municipal employees refused to work, creating real-world disruption that forced the city to negotiate. Federal employees conducted loosely organized strikes during the 2019 government shutdown, when TSA agents called in sick to protest working without pay, creating airport security lines that forced the government to reopen.

Federal detention facilities, ICE offices, and Border Patrol activities depend on federal employees and contracted workers who could withdraw their labor in coordinated fashion. If organized in multiple regions, withdrawal of labor would create simultaneous pressure impossible for authorities to ignore, as replacement workers can’t be immediately hired.

The difficulty: Federal employees risk their careers and pensions by striking. Federal labor law prohibits strikes by most federal employees, creating legal consequences. Workers in conservative regions may resist political participation in anti-ICE action.

Electoral Challenges to Democratic Officials

The Black Lives Matter movement’s 2020 electoral challenges to local prosecutors who declined to prosecute police officers resulted in numerous primary defeats. This forced politicians to shift positions on police violence and accountability. Research on social movements demonstrates that combining street protests with electoral pressure produces more significant policy changes than either approach alone.

Activists could identify Democratic House and Senate members in safe districts who have failed to support dismantling ICE or other movement demands. They could then coordinate primary challenges from immigrant rights–endorsed candidates. This would create election consequences for Democratic resistance to the movement’s agenda without ceding power to Republicans.

The difficulty: Building electoral organizations requires different skills, funding sources, and timelines than protest movements. Democratic Party machinery would use resources to protect incumbent members. Electoral campaigns require sustained effort over 18-24 month cycles, testing whether the movement can last.

Decentralized Community Defense Networks

The 1970s Chicano Moratorium movement in Los Angeles developed rapid-response teams that activated when police violence occurred in specific neighborhoods. This generated sustained pressure in multiple locations rather than concentrating at single events. The sanctuary movement of the 1980s and contemporary iterations coordinate community responses to deportations, hiding individuals and providing legal support.

Rather than concentrating action in downtown demonstrations that can be surrounded and dispersed by police, organizing infrastructure could shift toward distributed neighborhood-level networks. These would connect through WhatsApp, Signal, or other encrypted communication platforms. When community members witness ICE activities, they would immediately alert the network, enabling rapid response of large crowds at street-level detention sites.

Federal agents depend on rapid processing of detainees through facilities. Rapid-response disruption at street level—physically blocking vehicles, creating massive crowds—would delay federal activities while remaining legal, as assembly is constitutionally protected.

The difficulty: Law enforcement could arrest participants engaged in physically blocking vehicles or detention, putting them at legal risk. Federal agents could respond with escalated violence toward crowd participants. Decentralized networks are harder to sustain than centralized organizations—maintaining readiness requires significant ongoing volunteer commitment.

Corporate Divestment and Boycott Campaigns

The anti-apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s targeted corporations profiting from South African apartheid through shareholder activism, institutional divestment, and consumer boycotts. This pressured American companies to withdraw from South Africa. Campaigns targeting private prison corporations have pressured states to reduce reliance on private detention.

Private corporations operate ICE detention facilities (CoreCivic, GEO Group), provide transportation and logistics, manufacture and sell weapons and surveillance equipment, and offer security services. These corporations have legal obligations to shareholders and concerns about their reputation—sustained boycott campaigns and divestment pressure can create financial consequences for working with ICE.

University endowments, pension funds, and institutional investors hold significant shares in ICE-supporting companies. Campaigns to pressure divestment would create financial pressure and reputational costs. Consumer boycotts of companies like Amazon (providing cloud infrastructure supporting ICE) and Palantir (providing surveillance systems) could create financial consequences for working with ICE.

The difficulty: Private ICE detention operators and their lawyers would deploy substantial resources to resist divestment campaigns. Consumer boycotts require sustained participation—people’s consumption patterns are difficult to change and maintain. The link between what companies do and what the government does can be unclear and difficult to trace, potentially demoralizing participants who don’t perceive their efforts’ impact.

Policy Research and Training Infrastructure

The Movement for Black Lives’ creation of “M4BL Toolkit” materials, the development of “Defund the Police” spending models by public finance organizations, and academic research centers dedicated to these frameworks all represent infrastructure for turning demands into specific policy ideas. The establishment of sanctuary city policies required activists to develop legal knowledge about how cities could limit ICE collaboration while remaining within constitutional bounds.

“Abolish ICE” remains abstract—policymakers need concrete answers to questions like: What agencies would assume ICE’s functions? How would enforcement occur without ICE? What would humane enforcement look like?

By creating publicly-accessible research, policy briefs, and training materials, activists could shift the conversation from “should we abolish ICE?” to “how should we structure post-ICE policy?” This shifts the conversation from complaining to offering solutions, appealing to moderate politicians and bureaucrats.

The difficulty: Creating credible policy research requires resources and expertise—not all movement participants have academic credentials or policy experience. Focusing on “how this works” could be perceived as distraction from building power itself. The Trump administration showed no interest in ICE reform or restructuring—without political power shifts, even sophisticated policy proposals might remain unheeded.

Community-Based Accountability Mechanisms

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s executive order directing police to investigate reports of illegal activity by ICE agents and preserve evidence for potential state-level prosecution represented a sophisticated model of community-based accountability separate from federal systems. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission represented another model of community-based accountability separate from criminal prosecution.

Most directly impacted communities can’t access federal prosecution of federal agents—DOJ internal investigations remain opaque and rarely result in charges. However, state and local governments could establish their own investigative and prosecutorial mechanisms, as Mayor Johnson demonstrated.

Community-based accountability processes, while not resulting in traditional criminal conviction, could document violations, require offender accountability and apologies, and establish public record of misconduct affecting hiring and promotion decisions. Creating these mechanisms outside the federal system might be more achievable politically while still delivering meaningful accountability.

The difficulty: Federal agents could claim federal law overrides state law to block state/local prosecution, creating substantial legal uncertainty. Communities lack the investigative resources of federal agencies, potentially limiting accountability mechanisms’ credibility. Alternative justice approaches need victims to participate heavily—victims might prefer criminal prosecution.

Movement Trajectory and Constraints

As of early February, the anti-ICE movement faced junctures regarding sustained action, tactical evolution, and potential policy outcomes. Activists announced plans for a mobilization on March 28, suggesting intention to sustain pressure beyond the peak.

The movement’s immediate future depends partially on federal government responses to initial demands. If the Trump administration announces a complete withdrawal of agents from Minneapolis and launches serious prosecutions of agents responsible for Good and Pretti’s deaths, activists could claim significant victories and potentially shift focus toward sustained pressure for policy changes.

Conversely, if federal authorities harden their position, defend agent conduct, and expand ICE despite protest pressure, the risk that people will give up after losing repeatedly would increase.

Congressional dynamics will influence the movement’s trajectory. Democratic control of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform allows for public hearings and investigations documenting ICE violence and potential cover-ups. As the 2026 midterm election cycle accelerates, Democratic politicians will face pressure from movement activists to take stronger anti-ICE positions or face primary challenges.

Activists also face maintaining participation through sustained rather than one-off actions. Research on protest movements demonstrates that maintaining activist participation beyond initial enthusiasm requires wins people can see, clear links between what they do and what happens, and community infrastructure supporting long-term engagement.

This action achieved some victories—body cameras, partial drawdown—but not progress on dismantling ICE. Whether these partial victories will sustain or demoralize participation remains unclear. The coordination of 300+ simultaneous protests in fifty states represented significant organizing capacity. Translating that into sustained monthly or weekly actions will test durability.

The 2006 immigrant rights movement, despite exceeding the scale in raw numbers, failed to achieve reform and witnessed rapid demobilization followed by intensified activities. Yet it also demonstrates that large protest movements do influence policy in roundabout ways through public opinion shifts, deciding what issues matter and creating political opportunities that subsequent movements might exploit.

Academic research on social movement effectiveness suggests that the most successful movements combine multiple strategic approaches: direct disruption creating costs for elites, public opinion shifts delegitimizing opponents’ positions, electoral pressure holding elected officials accountable, and organizational infrastructure enabling sustained action.

This movement demonstrated capacity for disruption and public opinion influence but remained limited on sustained electoral pressure and power within established organizations. Whether activists can translate public opinion shifts—46 percent supporting dismantling ICE—into election and lawmaking consequences for politicians defending ICE remains the question determining the movement’s effectiveness.

The movement also illustrates a contradiction in American protest politics: that the groups most affected by the policies being protested often lack the power within established systems to force change. Immigrants themselves faced deportation risks from public visibility, limiting their direct protest participation. Instead, solidarity from protected groups—union workers, faith leaders, students, journalists—carried the primary weight of visible action.

This requires continuous dependence on allies’ political commitment. If allied groups make immigration less of a priority, capacity would contract. Yet the success in recruiting broad coalitions suggests that enforcement has become a mainstream concern crossing the usual liberal-conservative lines, potentially sustaining allied commitment even as immediate protest actions decline.

The question “Do mass protests change federal policy?” admits no simple answer. Protests change federal policy sometimes, in roundabout ways, when combined with other kinds of pressure, and when political conditions are right. This action achieved some policy changes while failing to achieve others. Whether it will contribute to dismantling ICE decades hence, as the 1960s civil rights movement contributed to 1990s criminal justice reforms, can only be determined through historical hindsight.

Federal authorities respond to large-scale, sustained, organized protest with some policy concessions. But those concessions remain partial, contested, and not enough to meet the movement’s goals. Sustaining pressure to transform those partial concessions into policy change requires the ongoing political infrastructure—sustained organization, electoral power, power within established systems—that remains the ongoing work for movements pursuing transformative change in American federal policy.

This article analyzes protest and activism tactics for educational purposes. We aim to contribute to effective and ethical efforts across the political spectrum, and we present diverse viewpoints and ideas without endorsement.