Are America’s Mayors Leading a Soft Secession?

We know the federal government is broken. We watch it cover up the Epstein files, steal elections in plain sight, and send armed agents into American neighborhoods to shoot unarmed people. We call our senators and hear nothing back. We vote and wonder if it mattered.

The doom scroll never ends, and the helplessness is the point.

But the helplessness is manufactured. The oligarchs who own the algorithms and the media stations profit from keeping us locked into despair, because despair keeps us watching and keeps us passive. It keeps us from looking at where American governance is actually working.

Soft secession does not mean states and cities declaring independence or flying new flags. It means states, cities, and municipalities quietly building the capacity to govern without federal cooperation, so that when the federal government turns hostile, they already have the infrastructure to say no. A governor who expands Medicaid because people need healthcare is governing. A governor who creates a state-run public option so her residents still have healthcare the next time Republicans try to gut the Affordable Care Act is building independence. One is good management. The other shifts the balance of power between the federal government and the people who actually live in the places it claims to serve. Soft secession operates at every level of government below the federal one, and the capacity for it was built into the American system from the beginning. The framers designed a structure where states, cities, and municipalities retain the authority to govern independently, and they did it deliberately. A generation of mayors figured out how to use it on purpose, and the results are hard to argue with.

If you live in one of these cities, thank your mayor. If you do not, start asking yours why not.

Baltimore is a good place to start. The city recorded 133 homicides in 2025, the fewest in nearly 50 years, capping a roughly 60 percent decline since Mayor Brandon Scott took office.1

Scott achieved this through the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which he launched in January 2022 to concentrate police work and social services on the small number of people most likely to shoot or get shot.2 The killings dropped faster every year after the program took hold: 21 percent the first year, 23 percent the next, then steeper still.2

No comparable American city has matched that pace. Scott did not wait for federal help. He built a local strategy, funded it with local dollars, and watched other mayors start calling to ask how he did it.

Denver’s Mike Johnston matched those results and then turned them into a platform. Homicides fell 48 percent in 2025, from 70 to 37, one of the lowest totals the city has recorded in more than three decades.3 Unsheltered homelessness dropped 45 percent.4 After the rebuilt 16th Street Mall reopened in October 2025, downtown foot traffic recovered to 99 percent of pre-pandemic levels by December.4

A mayor who has already fixed his own house walks into any room with something most politicians lack: proof. Johnston used that proof to build something larger. On January 28, he chaired the launch of the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Big City Alliance, a coalition of large-city mayors coordinating their opposition to the federal government.5 The real leverage is that Denver works, and other mayors can see it.

In measurable, concrete, show-me-the-numbers ways, America’s mayors are outperforming every other level of government right now. While we ask why our politicians refuse to stand up, a handful of them already have, and they are delivering results that hold up under scrutiny: historic drops in violent crime, declining homelessness despite an economic downturn driven by corrupt Republican federal capture, and replicable strategies that any city in the country can adopt.

And some of them are doing more than governing well. Some of them are fighting back.

Federal agents have killed American civilians in American cities and nobody has gone to jail for it. On September 12, 2025, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas Gonzalez during a traffic stop in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park. He was 38 years old and had two children.6 Body-camera footage from local police contradicted nearly every claim federal officials made about what happened. In Minneapolis, federal officers killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.7 No prosecutor has charged a federal agent involved in any of these killings.

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson built something in response that no other city has attempted. On January 31, 2026, he signed the “ICE On Notice” executive order, the first municipal directive that instructs local police to investigate federal immigration agents for misconduct, document their findings, and refer cases for criminal prosecution under state law.8 Every other city that lost a resident to federal agents filed a lawsuit or held a press conference. Johnson built a mechanism to put the next agent who kills someone in front of a state grand jury.

Other mayors built their own mechanisms. New York’s Zohran Mamdani barred ICE from city property without a judicial warrant and blocked agencies from sharing resident data with federal authorities.9 He also entered office with plans to create a city-owned public bank that would hold NYC’s public deposits and finance housing and infrastructure without Wall Street middlemen, the financial architecture that makes soft secession self-sustaining; he co-sponsored the New York Public Banking Act as a state assemblymember and called it during his campaign “a tool to break Wall Street’s grip on our future.”10 Boston’s Michelle Wu coordinated with five surrounding cities to ban ICE from municipal buildings and directed local police to investigate federal agents who break city or state law.11,12

Johnson built the prosecution pipeline. Wu built the investigation half and spread it across six cities.

Portland’s Keith Wilson found tools hiding in plain sight. Border Patrol agents shot two people in his city on January 8,13 and on January 31 federal agents tear-gassed a peaceful daytime protest outside an ICE facility, hitting a crowd that included children.14 Wilson’s administration cited the landlord of Portland’s ICE detention facility for land use violations, because a 2011 agreement prohibited overnight detention and city investigators found ICE had broken that rule at least 25 times.15 He then announced Portland would impose a fee on any detention facility that uses chemical agents against protesters.16

If an administrative review revokes the land use agreement, the landlord, who collects $2.4 million a year in rent from ICE, loses his most profitable tenant.15 Wilson used a line in a zoning code to threaten the financial foundation of a federal detention operation and turned the tear-gassing of children into a revenue penalty. Every city in America has zoning codes. Soft secession does not require new laws or dramatic confrontations. Sometimes it just requires a mayor who reads the fine print.

They are not alone. Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey barred federal agents from city facilities after federal officers killed two of his residents, though no state charges have followed. Seattle’s Katie Wilson signed an executive order banning federal agents from city property, directing Seattle police to investigate and document ICE activity with body cameras, gather evidence for referral to prosecutors, and restricting city data-sharing with federal authorities; the police union president publicly refused to cooperate.17 Atlanta’s Andre Dickens won re-election with 85 percent of the vote after driving homicides below 100 for the first time in years.18

Something is happening in American cities that the national conversation keeps missing. Mayors are cutting homicides, building housing, shrinking homelessness, and standing up to the federal government, all while that same government tries to punish them for protecting their own residents. This is soft secession in practice: not theory, not aspiration, but a proven record of cities building independence and refusing to wait for the federal government to fix what they can fix themselves.

We do not have to wait for the next presidential election to see what works. The mayors who are already doing it need us to pay attention, show up at city hall, and make the same demands of every mayor who has not yet found the nerve. The federal government has become the adversary. Our cities are what we have left, and the people running them are proving that local power, wielded with precision and courage, still works.

Here is what we can demand, and who already proved it works:

- Direct local police to investigate federal agents who break city or state law, document their findings with body cameras, and refer evidence to prosecutors. Chicago, Boston, and Seattle have done this.

- Impose fees and financial penalties on facilities that deploy chemical agents against civilians. Portland announced this after federal agents tear-gassed a crowd that included children.

- Enforce existing zoning codes against federal detention facilities. Portland cited an ICE landlord for at least 25 violations of a land use agreement and put $2.4 million in annual rent at risk.

- Ban federal agents from operating on city property without a judicial warrant. New York, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, and five additional cities around Boston have signed these orders.

- Restrict city agencies from sharing resident data with federal immigration authorities. New York and Seattle have done this.

- Coordinate executive orders with neighboring cities to create regional walls, not just municipal ones. Boston organized six cities to act together.

- Create a city-owned public bank to hold municipal deposits and finance housing and infrastructure without Wall Street. New York’s mayor entered office with legislation to do exactly this.

Every one of these tools already works somewhere. None of them require permission from Congress, cooperation from the White House, or a federal judge’s blessing. They require a mayor who decides to use them.

Take this list to your governor, your state attorney general, and your county prosecutors. Federal agents who assault, kidnap, or kill people inside your state have committed state crimes, and state prosecutors already have jurisdiction to charge them. A state conviction sits outside the president’s pardon power. We do not stop a bully by handing over our lunch money, and we do not stop an authoritarian by backing down every time they threaten escalation. They will always threaten escalation. That is how it works. If we keep bending the knee, they keep taking ground, and what comes next is worse than what came before. Prosecute them when they break the law. That is what the law is for.

These mayors saw what was happening and decided to act. They looked at the tools they already had, and they used them. That is what soft secession looks like when it stops being a theory and starts being a strategy, and every city in the country can do the same thing tomorrow morning.

Physical booklets including the Introduction to Soft Secession, Oppositional Federalism, and the Educate Activate Recruit Repeat training manual are available for at TheExistentialistRepublic.com , along with democracy merch. Digital copies of everything available in the shop at Buymeacoffee.com/theER .

Works Cited

1. “Mayor Brandon M. Scott releases homicide and non-fatal shooting numbers for beginning of 2026,” Baltimore City Mayor’s Office, February 2, 2026. https://mayor.baltimorecity.gov/news/press-releases/2026-02-02-mayor-brandon-m-scott-releases-homicide-and-non-fatal-shooting

2. “Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott discusses how the city has brought violent crime down,” NPR, August 19, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/19/nx-s1-5503390/baltimore-mayor-brandon-scott-low-crime-rates

3. “Denver homicides declined 48% in 2025,” Colorado Politics, January 2, 2026. https://www.coloradopolitics.com/2026/01/02/denver-homicides-declined-48-in-2025/

4. John Ingold, “More housing, less vacancy, affordable childcare: What Mayor Mike Johnston wants to do in 2026,” Denverite, January 26, 2026. https://denverite.com/2026/01/26/the-mayor-has-big-goals-this-year-heres-what-they-are/

5. “Denver backs Minnesota’s legal action to end ICE deployment,” Colorado Politics, January 28, 2026. https://www.coloradopolitics.com/2026/01/28/denver-backs-minnesotas-legal-action-to-end-ice-deployment/

6. Nicole Acevedo, “Family of Mexican father fatally shot by ICE near Chicago ‘wants justice to be done,’” NBC News, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/immigrant-shot-dead-chicago-ice-villegas-gonzalez-family-answers-rcna231952

7. Jodi Kantor, “How Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s response to ICE could become a Democratic blueprint,” CNN Politics, January 16, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/16/politics/jacob-frey-minneapolis-mayor-ice-protests

8. Paris Schutz, “Mayor Johnson signs executive order designed to lay ‘groundwork’ to prosecute federal agents,” WTTW Chicago, January 31, 2026. https://news.wttw.com/2026/01/31/mayor-johnson-signs-executive-order-designed-lay-groundwork-prosecute-federal-agents

9. “Mamdani signs New York executive order targeting ICE,” Newsweek, February 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/mamdani-signs-new-york-executive-order-targeting-ice-11488358

10. “New York City’s Forgotten Public Bank Plan,” Jacobin, December 2025. https://jacobin.com/2025/12/nyc-public-bank-mamdani-finance

11. “Mayor Michelle Wu announces executive order to protect Bostonians from unconstitutional and violent federal operations,” Boston.gov, February 2026. https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-michelle-wu-announces-executive-order-protect-bostonians-unconstitutional-and-violent

12. “Wu, five other Greater Boston leaders move to ban ICE from detaining people on city property,” The Boston Globe, February 5, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/05/metro/boston-mayor-michelle-wu-ice-executive-order/

13. Phil Helsel, “2 people shot by Border Patrol agent in Portland identified by DHS,” NBC News, January 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-people-shot-border-patrol-agent-portland-police-say-rcna253141

14. “Portland mayor says ‘to those who continue to work for ICE: Resign,’” KATU, January 31, 2026. https://katu.com/news/local/portland-mayor-says-to-donald-trump-those-who-continue-to-work-for-ice-resign-keith-wilson-oregon-protest-rally-march-ice-immigration-customs-enforcement-shooting-riot-control-deployed-munition

15. “Portland Mayor statement on ICE land use review,” Portland.gov, January 21, 2026. https://www.portland.gov/mayor/keith-wilson/news/2026/1/21/portland-mayor-statement-ice-land-use-review

16. “Mayor of Portland, Oregon, demands U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement leave his city after federal agents launched tear gas at demonstrators,” CBS News, February 1, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/portland-ice-protests-saturday-mayor-keith-wilson/

17. “Mayor Wilson announces initial steps to address federal immigration enforcement activities,” Office of the Mayor, City of Seattle, January 29, 2026. http://wilson.seattle.gov/2026/01/29/mayor-wilson-announces-initial-steps-to-address-federal-immigration-enforcement-activities/

18. “Mayor Andre Dickens kicks off second term with inauguration week focused on service,” City of Atlanta, January 2026. https://www.atlantaga.gov/Home/Components/News/News/15608/1338