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In June, 1994, I took the F train out to Coney Island to root for my friend Phil, who was skating, solo, in the Gay Games. From the bleachers of the Abe Stark Arena, our college friends cheered wildly as Phil, who was a novice, performed a few simple spins. But the most startling event was the couples competition, which featured a pair of male skaters, dressed in camouflage, with tape over their mouths in an “X”—a direct protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The couple who followed them—two shirtless men, around the same height, alternately lifting each other up and rolling over each other with playful, affectionate aggression—struck me as equally political, suggesting not just what was banned but what was possible. It was like watching two trees dance.

In the short documentary “Icebreakers,” Jocelyn Glatzer and Marlo Poras explore the legacy of the Gay Games, nearly half a century after the institution was founded, in 1982, as an all-embracing extension of—and also a challenge to—the Olympics. Their film is built around a handful of key figures, including the renowned coach Wade Corbett (who trained Phil, back in 1994) and the lesbian skater Laura Moore, a cheerful firecracker who began her career after nearly twenty years in the closet. She sums up ice skating, crisply, as “a very gay sport” and “a very homophobic sport.”

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Glatzer and Poras dramatize that tension through interviews with Joel Dear and Christian Erwin, who teamed up for the couples competition at the 2018 Gay Games, in Paris, and Mark Stanford, a Black gay skater with H.I.V. Many of the obstacles these athletes face are institutional. Russia, where even discussing L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity is illegal, dominates Olympic-level skating; few pros are “out,” for fear of hurting their marketability. And, as Corbett notes, traditional figure skating hinges on a vision of heterosexual romance that’s both erotic and formulaic: a glittery princess tossed in the air, spun by a powerful man. This model gets into the head of gay competitors, too. After years of skating with a female partner, Dear felt “uneasy” skating with a man. When Erwin told his mother of his plan, she said, “Isn’t that a family show?”

There have been encouraging developments since “Icebreakers” was shot: the U.K., following the lead of Finland and Canada, has agreed to let same-sex couples compete on a national level. The success of “Heated Rivalry,” a Canadian TV series about closeted hockey players, has made these issues visceral (and hot) to a mainstream audience. But watching the film, with its dizzying montage of skaters—raw amateurs and sleek pros, swishy and butch, comedic and sincere, boldly solo and intimately paired—made me crave more than baby steps. Hearing Dear speak about his anxieties, then seeing him glide across the ice, tenderly, in tandem with Erwin, took me back to 1994, and to the sensation of witnessing something truly new: a liberation available to everyone, even those up in the bleachers.

Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it’s now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or “trading,” if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race. Betting, like cannabis and cabaret before it, has shed its reputation as a vice, and the nation has eagerly forgotten that sportsbooks exist to turn a profit. Even the addiction hotline 1-800-GAMBLER suddenly sounds like the number you’d dial to start gambling.

A new memoir by the retired bookmaker Art Manteris, “The Bookie: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode,” helps us to understand how we got here, and to glimpse the industry in its fledgling form. Manteris spent decades running sportsbooks in Vegas, presiding over such fabled dens of iniquity as Caesars Palace and the Hilton; the industry he left in 2021 bore little resemblance to the one he’d entered. That was thanks to the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which had restricted sports gambling largely to Nevada. Manteris had hoped that PASPA’s demise would wipe away “a hundred years’ worth of fierce opposition and moral outrage to sports betting.” But he concedes that the new regime has done more harm than good—by lowering the barriers to underage bettors, encouraging cheating among athletes, and making the industry vastly impersonal. Things were more manageable, he says, in his day, when he ran a good, clean shop.

One might have a hard time believing him, at first. Born in Pittsburgh, Manteris followed his Uncle Jack to Sin City in 1978 and never left. Vegas was small then; you could wave to Robert Goulet at a traffic light or chat up Tony Curtis at the grocery store. The city was well in the palm of organized crime, and Manteris was soon surrounded by the kinds of characters who were later portrayed, under aliases, in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” “The Bookie” is so rich in Franks (Mastroianni, Regina, Fertitta, Rosenthal), Johnnys (Avello, Tocco), Tonys (Taeubel, Spilotro), and Jimmys (McHugh, Newman, Vaccaro) that I lost track of who was mobbed up, who was down-and-out, and who was genuinely having a good time. Skimming was endemic among bookmakers, enforcement was brutal, and several of Manteris’s early acquaintances met violent ends. He dispenses with these stories quickly: “Tony Spilotro was beaten to death in a cornfield in Illinois that summer.”

Bookmaking in those days was an artisanal craft, practiced by hand on elaborate legal-paper charts. Horse-race results came in on ticker tape. Setting the odds for a game was more a matter of delicate intuition than wonkish number crunching. By the end of the book, the mechanics of odds-making were still as arcane to me as Ptolemaic tax codes, but Manteris found that he was a statistical savant. “Odds, point spreads, and probabilities constantly floated around inside my brain,” he writes, tapping into the mystical appeal of risk management. “Numbers embedded themselves into my consciousness . . . maddening, wonderful, and addictive.”

Beating the odds, too, required grit and determination. Reliable information about injuries, coaching decisions, and the like was hard to come by, so bettors went to absurd lengths to gain an edge on the books. One of them hired a private eye to tail a finicky N.B.A. referee for an entire season just to know in advance which games he’d be working. The same gambler had an inside line to the Detroit Pistons’ timekeeper, who would manipulate the length of the game to eke out some extra points.

It helped to have technology on your side, too, no matter how primitive. Manteris’s nemesis, Billy Walters, one of the winningest sports bettors of all time, belonged to a syndicate called the Computer Group, which must’ve sounded fearsomely futuristic in the eighties. Walters and his crew were armed with a predictive algorithm developed by a math whiz whose day job was developing nuclear-submarine tech. Picks in hand, they would spread their gospel through a network of beepers or earpieces; his disciples, or runners, crowded sportsbooks around town and placed bets on his behalf totalling millions of dollars a week. They sometimes set up smoke screens so that the odds moved in the wrong direction, sending his competitors off course. Walters’s wagers were so successful that one casino hired a pair of mathematicians to deconstruct them.

To guard against runners and other forms of malfeasance, Manteris maintained a cutting-edge surveillance system. He’s still proud of the panopticon he helped develop at the Hilton SuperBook (home of the SuperContest), which boasted “upward of eight hundred VCRs” and a console manned by three or four people, “maneuvering the hundreds of cameras stationed throughout the casino, plus the forty pointed at and monitoring the sportsbook.” While the bettors were busy screaming at televisions or enjoying a comped round of Jameson, he could watch the beepers beeping and the symphony of cash changing hands—this if he wasn’t “returning from a light workout and rubdown at the Hilton Health Club on the third floor.” Surveillance cameras notwithstanding, Manteris got quite an eyeful over the years. He witnessed the “360 degrees of porn” wallpapering the Stardust boardroom; Rodney Dangerfield at a boxing match, snorting coke from a spoon during the national anthem; and early U.F.C. fights that convinced him the sport was “too brutal to go mainstream.” Still, he writes, “Through it all I loved my profession.”

It does seem that he approached his work with a measure of solicitude unusual in his field. Even so, “The Bookie” gives the impression that Vegas, even at its most corporate and aboveboard, runs on animosity and despair. (It must be said that plenty of other industries do, too.) The memoir shows little interest in the gambler’s psychology or the keening dramas of the floor. Manteris’s job, as he saw it, was “to create an entertainment experience to keep the ‘preferred customers’ coming back.” Those customers were the sort who could drop six or seven figures on a bet and still feel, after they’d lost, that they’d had “an entertainment experience.” Manteris allows that he “saw loved ones hurt by overindulgence,” and his own brother was consumed by a betting addiction, but there’s no flop sweat in his sportsbooks as he describes them—no one is gambling away the kids’ college funds just to feel alive. When he writes that he “always encouraged parlays”—bets that combine multiple wagers, becoming increasingly unwinnable every step of the way—because “the odds against them were so high,” we are not meant to dwell on the fact that he urged his customers toward suckerdom. We should assume they wanted to be pushed.

Billy Walters, the author of another recent insider’s account, “Gambler,” didn’t need any pushing. As a self-described “former degenerate gambler,” he never met a massive bet that he wasn’t willing to take—provided, of course, that he could convince himself the odds were on his side. Walters once wagered on which direction a robin would fly when it departed a phone line it was sitting on; as a young man, he made a bet on his own life expectancy. (The over-under was thirty-five, and he won.) Casinos would seem to depend on men like him. When Manteris writes, then, that “the rich history of Las Vegas is not written by the likes of Billy Walters,” it’s easy to object, not least because “Gambler” includes a rich history of Las Vegas. Intriguingly, it mentions Manteris not once.

Maybe that’s because Manteris was exactly the kind of bookie that Walters couldn’t stand: one who wasn’t interested in his business. Sports betting, for Walters, amounts to “psychological warfare between bettor and bookmaker—cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The posted line is just a way to trigger the game.” The best bookies relish that fight, no matter how dirty it may become or what sort of arms race it compels. He laments “the unwritten code of casino misconduct: beat us, and we’ll ban you.” When, in 1997, the Nevada Gaming Control Board tightened its regulations against “messenger” betting—professional networks of runners like those that Walters relied on—he felt that it was the work of “shortsighted sportsbook operators who were trying to put pro handicappers like me out of business.”

Walters had a hardscrabble upbringing in Munfordville, Kentucky. He moved to Louisville, where, by age thirty, he’d had three marriages, three kids, and a vasectomy, which he paid for with a set of used golf clubs. Though he’d found employment as a foundry worker, a custodian at a tobacco factory, and a car salesman, his penchant for drink and dice kept him in the red. In 1982, after state police broke up his illegal bookmaking operation, he moved to Vegas, where he crossed paths with the same sordid mobsters and two-bit hustlers that Manteris did. (Walters, too, shed nary a tear when Spilotro’s body turned up in that cornfield.)

Linking up with the Computer Group taught Walters that, if he stayed sober and disciplined, he could turn the boom-and-bust cycle of his addiction into a profession. At this point, he ceased to resemble the recreational gambler as we know him. An ordinary bettor may be guided by team loyalty, intuition, or emotion—Walters was governed by dispassionate information. An ordinary bettor might lay down money just to increase the pleasure of watching a big game—Walters was betting so much, so frequently, that spectatorship only reminded him of potential insolvency.

He didn’t mind: losing, according to an old adage he cites, is the second-greatest thrill in gambling. Plus, Walters had defanged chance by acquiring something close to sports omniscience. He spent his days immersed in the minutiae of games. A deal with cleaning crews at McCarran International allowed him to collect the crumpled newspapers that passengers left on airplanes, granting him access to sports pages from around the world. These, along with handicapping newsletters like GoldSheet and his intelligence from the Computer Group, gave him a competitive edge on bookies. Considering “S-factors (special situations), W-factors (weather), and E-factors (emotional),” he made careful calculations for home-field advantages, the amount of rest a team had had, the number of days they’d been on the road, the number of time zones they’d changed, dramatic shifts in climate or temperature, and “motivational factors such as revenge.” More than a gambler, he was a kind of athletic actuary.

Were his efforts strictly on the up and up? Manteris has his doubts: “Until the day I die,” he writes, “I will probably question how Walters had important player injury information first.” Bookies weren’t the only ones who wondered. The Computer Group was twice raided by the F.B.I., though agents never turned up enough evidence to make a winning case. In 1992, a federal jury acquitted Walters and his associates of charges of conspiracy and the illegal transmission of wagering information. His next company, Sierra Sports Consulting, faced allegations of money laundering following a raid by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; a judge later dismissed the charges. On the advice of his lawyers, Walters moved his operation to Panama, where his office had “the look of a CIA operation,” with legions of employees placing bets from afar using “two-ton Vonage boxes” to disguise their locations. They could bring in millions of dollars on one football game alone.

You won’t be shocked to learn that Walters wound up behind bars, though it was a more legitimatized form of gambling—the stock market—that ultimately did him in. In 2017, having curiously avoided losses on his shares of Dean Foods stock, he was federally convicted of insider trading; President Trump commuted his five-year prison sentence in 2021.

“Gambler,” thus, has an air of reputation management to it. Walters maintains his innocence, presenting himself as a man with no secrets left to hide; he even includes a raft of “charts and numbers that [he’s] never shared before” to help aspirant bettors partake of his expertise. Where Manteris is leery of the era of DraftKings, Walters believes that PASPA’s fall has fuelled job creation, generated tax revenue, and minimized the criminal element in sports gambling. Maybe it’s telling that the bookie prefers more regulation, whereas the gambler enjoys playing fast and loose; clearly, Walters’s brand of widespread “psychological warfare” is best practiced with minimal government oversight. Both memoirs prepare the lay gambler for a world of gruelling, bruising defeats and unglamorous back-of-the-envelope calculus. I’ve seldom met a vice I don’t like—and yet these stories incline me to stay away from the sportsbook, be it onscreen or on the Strip. It’s not just that the house always wins. It’s that I can imagine sharing in Walters’s quest for perfect prediction, his desire to tame uncertainty, and I fear where that obsession might lead. If I started wagering on Polymarket’s natural-disaster odds, for instance, would I develop a deeper interest in geology, or the megalomaniacal desire to cause an earthquake? The latter, of course. You can bet on it. ♦

In February, a pop-up science column, Annals of Inquiry, is appearing in place of Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll. Chayka will return in March.

Jane Goodall, the late primatologist, was known for her imitations of chimpanzee greetings. When she met with Prince Harry, in 2019, she approached him slowly, making panting noises through circular lips. She prompted him to pat her lightly on the head, then reached up for an embrace, making soft hooting sounds. During her career, Goodall observed chimps engaging in more than a thousand such greetings. They sometimes touched their lips together, breathed into one another’s open mouths, or stood on two legs and hugged.

Greetings are found across the animal kingdom. Dogs sniff each other’s rears, African elephants swing their trunks, and songbirds peck at one another’s feathers. Orcas face off in rows before rushing into a sort of whale mosh pit, in which they slap tails, squeak, and whistle. Greeting behaviors are universal enough that they are thought to be ancient, emerging before primate groups evolved. When a spectral bat wraps its wings around another bat in what looks like a hug, it seems to be communicating something that we’re familiar with.

Goodbyes, on the other hand, were long understood as a behavior that only humans perform. In 2013, Goodall watched as a chimpanzee named Wounda, who had almost died at the hands of poachers, was released to a Congolese animal sanctuary. Before Wounda walked into the trees, she hugged Goodall for several seconds. After Goodall died, this past October, some claimed that the video showed Wounda saying goodbye—but the Jane Goodall Institute had only described the embrace as a way of “giving thanks.” Indeed, a survey of researchers at ten wild-chimpanzee sites, co-conducted in 2016 by Lucy Baehren, a Cambridge student, documented numerous chimp greetings but nothing that could be construed as a “leave-taking” behavior. “The idea that nonhuman animals say goodbye did not exist,” Susana Carvalho, a primatologist and a paleoanthropologist at Oxford who became Baehren’s supervisor, told me.

The mystery of the missing farewells inspired many theories. It led scholars to think that goodbyes must have evolved separately from greetings, and more recently. The study of leave-taking was assumed to be more complicated than the study of greetings. Some researchers suggested that goodbyes required cognitive abilities that many nonhuman animals might lack, such as the capacity to imagine and plan for the future. “Why are you going to say goodbye if, upon return, no one remembers?” Carvalho said.

But a few years ago, after analyzing dozens of hours of footage of Chacma baboons, Carvalho and Baehren noticed a subtle body movement that happened only right before baboons ended a social interaction. They went on to publish what they called the first empirical evidence of a nonhuman animal’s goodbye. “The presence of leave taking in baboons could suggest a deep evolutionary history of the behaviour, present since the last common ancestors of humans and baboons,” they wrote. (Humans and baboons diverged more than twenty million years ago.) Goodall argued that greetings were proof of how similar humans were to other animals. Goodbyes gained the opposite meaning: they symbolized our differences from other creatures. Where would a new theory of leave-taking leave us?

The sociologist Erving Goffman thought that when two people encounter each another, they both try to manage the impression that they’re making, following a kind of script that ends with a goodbye. “The goodbye brings the encounter to an unambiguous close, sums up the consequence of the encounter for the relationship, and bolsters the relationship for the anticipated period of no contact,” he wrote in his 1971 book, “Relations in Public.” Goffman also described the special awkwardness of “failed departures”—for example, when two people say goodbye, only to start walking in the same direction.

In the seventies, a communication researcher at Purdue University, Mark Knapp, argued that behavioral research—Goffman’s work notwithstanding—had neglected goodbyes, even though they were a ritual that everyone participated in. “Unique and terribly human interpersonal forces are unleashed when people say goodbye to one another,” Knapp and his colleagues wrote. They tried to break down leave-taking beat by beat, noting, for example, that goodbyes could be preceded by “explosive hand contact”—slapping one’s hands on the surface of a table or on one’s thighs. The linguists Emanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks described verbal markers that indicated an interaction was wrapping up, for example, “well . . .” or “O.K. . . .” Others found that, for children, greetings may come more naturally than goodbyes. (Think of the kid who says goodbye to every stranger on a bus, or to every diner in a restaurant.) One hint that the goodbye requires effort, and carries real social weight, is that we even have a name for its absence: to leave a party or a bar without saying farewell is to make an “Irish exit.” Apparently, the same phenomenon is sometimes known in Germany as “the Polish goodbye” and in France as leaving “in the English way.”

After I started writing this piece, I became hyperaware of the goodbyes in my life. Visiting a restaurant in Brooklyn where I used to work, I remembered that it was customary to kiss regulars on both cheeks, as some Europeans do. I’m not sure who started the ritual, but it became rude to skip it, even when I was saying farewell to someone with a cold or trying to leave at the end of a tiring shift. My husband’s father, when talking on the phone, will interrupt you mid-sentence to say, “Well, I should probably let you go now,” and then hang up. It’s jarring, but charming, and no one holds a grudge. I’m told that acquaintances hint at an impending farewell by gesturing toward the future, saying something like “So what are you up to this weekend?”

Goodbyes can be staggering in their variety, and they can’t be predicted based on how a person says hello. In the early twentieth century, on the Andaman Islands, social anthropologists observed ritualistic greetings that involved wailing and weeping. Locals took their leave from friends and family in a much more demure way: a person would lift their hand toward their mouth and blow air on it gently. Many familiar ways of saying goodbye are actually quite recent. The “hello” handshake has been around for a long time, but there are few recorded instances of a “goodbye” handshake until the fifteenth century, according to Torbjörn Lundmark, the author of “Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World.” He notes that, as recently as the nineteen-seventies, handshakes weren’t a commonly recognizable way of saying farewell in China.

Lundmark also wrote that a farewell meal in China often includes long thin noodles, to symbolize the winding road ahead, but not cut-up pears, whose Chinese word sounds the same as the word for “separation.” A host may prolong the encounter, he added, by insisting that guests stay as long as possible—a ritual that “can reach a highly emotional pitch, ending up almost in an outright argument between host and visitor.” In England, leave-taking is similarly drawn out, the anthropologist Kate Fox writes in “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior.” Just when you think that the farewell has been accomplished, one of the hosts or guests might start the process all over again.

Primates were rumored to say goodbye at least a few times before Baehren and Carvalho’s study of Chacma baboons. In the 1982 book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes,” the primate behaviorist Frans de Waal wrote that chimps in a sign-language experiment learned to signal “bye-bye.” A gorilla in a zoo in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, is said to have kissed zookeepers before going inside her enclosure. But Baehren and Carvalho pointed out that these behaviors, which took place rarely and in captivity, might only be imitations of human communication.

Captive chimpanzees and bonobos do make gestures and share eye contact at the beginning and end of activities that they do together. A skeptic could consider these “exit behaviors” rather than leave-taking ones, Evelina Daniela Rodrigues, a researcher at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, told me. (A human exit behavior might include checking around your table at a café, to make sure you haven’t left anything behind.) It’s also difficult to distinguish between “goodbye” and “do you want to come with me?” Rodrigues said. Baboons will show their buttocks to others before walking away; the entire troop then departs. This could be a signal to the group, instead of a leave-taking behavior. In 2022, while reviewing videos of twenty-two wild chimpanzees in Guinea, Rodrigues found very few instances when chimps ended a social interaction with a behavior that could be considered leave-taking. In addition, those behaviors were repeated in other contexts, so they might not have been goodbyes. It’s been difficult to study leave-taking, Rodrigues said, because researchers haven’t agreed on a precise definition or a way of searching for it.

Baehren and Carvalho’s process was to record all of the times a baboon ended a social interaction, wait to make sure they really parted, and then rewind to analyze the encounters. They accumulated more than sixty-five hours of footage from Gorongosa National Park, in Mozambique, where baboons live in large groups that feature strong female relationships; males tend to come and go. Baehren was the first to notice that baboons appeared to shift their bodies and gaze in the direction of an impending departure. (They didn’t shift their bodies when they were alone and preparing to head in a new direction, or when they were close to another baboon with whom they weren’t interacting.) Carvalho declared the finding a breakthrough. “We could say out loud: primates do say goodbye, and we have found how baboons do it,” she said.

I have to admit that, when I saw photos of the baboon goodbye, my first thought was that a human would be considered pretty rude for doing the same. Imagine you’re at dinner with a friend; at some point, she turns her torso slightly, gets up, and walks off. But I had to check myself. If goodbyes change from one country to the next, then we surely can’t expect them to translate between species. Human goodbyes depend heavily on context; something as subtle as a nod of the head is sometimes an acceptable way to part. Perhaps, in context, the baboons’ gesture is as friendly as a handshake. I wondered how often we misunderstood animals in an effort to interpret them with our terribly human assumptions.

Lydia Hopper, a primatologist and comparative psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research, thought it was plausible that a nonhuman animal’s goodbye would be subtle and gestural. “Even if we had been looking, we might have missed it,” she said. She considered Carvalho and Baehren’s finding “tantalizing,” but not definitive. “Maybe animals do perform some leave-taking behaviors,” she told me. “Maybe it’s not to the same frequency or degree as humans, and not the same strength or style as humans.”

Human goodbyes have a lot to do with how strong our bonds are. I am likely to say one goodbye to my sister and another to a colleague or a barista. Ironically, I’d probably be nicer to a stranger than I sometimes am to my relatives—but not too much nicer, which would be creepy. “If you’re buying something at a store, you are not going to hug them when you check out,” Hopper said. But intimacy can’t explain everything. In November, Hopper wrote in a scientific paper that our goodbyes depend in part on an understanding of what’s going to happen in the future. Last summer, after my sister moved to my neighborhood and we began going to the grocery store and the gym together, I noticed that our farewells became truncated—we’d exchange a brusque goodbye and then leave the other on the sidewalk. But when I parted with my best friend late last year, in Berlin, I knew I’d be away from her for many months. We hugged each other close and said, “I love you.”

Our relationship to time may be one of the most important differences between us and other animals. Cats and dogs certainly greet us, and they act troubled when their people prepare to leave them, whether by whining or curling up in an open suitcase. But they presumably can’t understand “I’ll see you in two weeks.” To a dog, our fervent and prolonged goodbyes at the front door might seem as peculiar and impenetrable as the greetings of an orca do to us. Perhaps it would be better to give our pets an Irish goodbye (or one in the English way).

Humans have a complicated history of assessing nonhuman animals. In some cases, we have overinterpreted their behaviors. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a horse named Clever Hans was credited with talking and doing math—until a psychologist determined that he was responding to involuntary cues. But in other instances we can be prone to what De Waal has called “anthropodenial,” an overcorrection from anthropomorphism. Researchers are so careful to differentiate humans from other species that they say primates have a “close social associate,” not a friend, and that they engage in “vocalized panting,” not laughing. Animals could have ways of saying goodbye that we haven’t acknowledged yet.

We shouldn’t assume that primates are missing the cognitive capacities that I employ with, say, my sister or my barista, according to Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews. Wild chimpanzees can plan where they are going to sleep based on what fruit they want for breakfast in the morning. A male chimpanzee at the Furuvik Zoo, in Sweden, hid rocks from zookeepers and threw them at visitors the following day. Chimpanzees recognize individuals that they haven’t seen for years. “They have a sense of absence, and I certainly think that they have a sense of death,” Hobaiter told me.

If primates may be capable of saying farewell, why wouldn’t they? There are many explanations, Hobaiter said. Long after two chimpanzees part, for example, they can trade vocalizations from one treetop to another. “The species at which we’re currently looking might not need to take leave,” Hobaiter said. It’s a striking thought—that other primates simply don’t need goodbyes as much as we do.

Goffman wrote that our farewells help us transition into “a state of decreased access” to one another. “One of the biggest stresses to social bonds is when somebody leaves you,” Hopper said. A goodbye manages the uncertainty of separation; it’s a signal that you won’t be gone forever, that you’re parting on good terms, and that eventually you’ll pick things up where you left off. Studying the rest of the animal kingdom reminds us just how much we’ve complicated that message. For a baboon, maybe it’s enough to turn away. ♦

This past week in New York City, fifteen inches of snow fell and more than twenty-two hundred snowplows pushed it away. Twelve thousand miles of sidewalk were shovelled. Two hundred and nine million pounds of salt were spread, and, after it got really bad, two hundred thousand gallons of calcium chloride, a chemical ice melt, were deployed. Sometimes the work you do leaves its mark; sometimes it doesn’t. With snow, the evidence has a tendency to melt. But, this year, as the temperature refused to rise above freezing, what remained hardened into ice, and settled. In the streets, these conditions have brought attention to something called a sneckdown.

“Sneckdown” is a portmanteau of “snow” and “neckdown,” a term for a part of the sidewalk, also known as a curb extension, that juts into the street, to protect pedestrians. The sneckdown is the snow that builds up on parts of the street that cars don’t use, acting as a natural curb extension. At intersections, it can be found mostly on corners, as the city pushes it one way and property owners push it the other. The sneckdown is also what people awkwardly have to step through as a result. Recently, I have encountered sneckdowns while going to work, going to the gym, popping to the store, hurrying for the bus, and on the way to a hard-to-get dinner reservation that a friend made, perhaps unwisely, weeks before the snowstorm. Almost any New Yorker who has to cross the street has become familiar with the sneckdown, often at a level just between the sock and the waterproof shoe.

I saw my first sneckdown of the year on a corner of Gates Avenue, in Clinton Hill, a few yards from my apartment. The snow had stopped falling, and a plow had come through. My neighbors had shovelled their stoops. But there remained a solid mound of ice, curving out across the road, like a bumper on one side of a pool table. I walked out and tried to avoid becoming a billiard ball. Sneckdowns are something of a gray area, as they live partly on the sidewalk and partly on the street. They are where the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the state meet. It gets slippery.

To some urbanists, a sneckdown offers a vision of a better world. The term was popularized by Clarence Eckerson, Jr., a documentarian who started filming sneckdowns in the early twenty-tens, for the pro-transit website Streetsblog. “It’s the space that is revealed that we could take back for other things,” Eckerson told me recently. Sneckdowns slow cars as they turn, and make pedestrians more visible. Ahead of the storm, Streetsblog called on readers to send photos of sneckdowns to the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to show him where the city could make more room for pedestrians. This past Tuesday, Eckerson ran around City Hall and his home, in Jackson Heights, hunting for the best sneckdowns, for a new video. He had a full shoulder-replacement surgery scheduled for the next day. That morning, he shot some pickups; an anesthesiologist fitted him with a mask a few hours later. “I’m very dedicated,” he told me over Zoom, his arm in a padded black sling. Out on the street, he’d seen a huge eighteen-wheeler truck, hauling Goya beans, bend around a sneckdown in Jackson Heights—and nail the turn with five or six feet of snow to spare. “You could take back some of it at the very least,” he said.

The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, to watch the destruction of a few sneckdowns. It was the sixth day in a row below freezing, and Goodman wore a green D.S.N.Y. jacket, a gray beanie, and duck boots. Together, we watched a skid steer, a maneuverable miniature excavator, attack a sneckdown that had built up on a street corner, near a gas station. Conditions were tough. Handheld tools sometimes broke. “These are one of the only things that can break an ice boulder,” Goodman told me.

Not every pile of ice is a sneckdown. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path through a sneckdown that lets people cross the street is known as a “curb cut.” A blocked-off bus stop is not a sneckdown. “I’ve seen people post their own photos and I’ll be, like, ‘Well that’s not a sneckdown,’ ” Eckerson told me. One helpful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it’s not a sneckdown—the cars have been using it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of what the street is for.

Most of the time, when people complain about lingering, no-man’s-land snow, they are complaining about something called the curbline. This is the snow that piles up between the cleared path of the sidewalk and the street, often against parked cars, maybe crowned with trash. Property owners don’t have to clear more than a four-foot-wide path, enough for a stroller or a wheelchair; the city doesn’t have to, either.

Goodman told me it’s simple: if snow is on the street, it’s the city’s responsibility. If it’s on the sidewalk, it’s the property owner’s. But there are complications; the snow around a parked car is the responsibility of the driver—even though it’s on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Department of Transportation is on the hook. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the property owner whose place abuts the stop, but the city must insure that the bus can pull up to the curb. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought it was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at every stop.

On Broadway, a crew of emergency shovellers, whom the city pays a starting rate of $19.14 an hour, were deployed to another corner, outside a radiologist’s office. One shoveller, Anthony Gutierrez, who is normally a truck driver, was hacking away at a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest that said “laborer” and an ushanka hat. “I have shovelling experience—I once excavated a big hole,” he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. This was his third twelve-hour shift. “Our neighbors need to pass these streets,” he said, undeterred.

Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every street in the city was last plowed. The computer program that tracks the snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it isn’t snowing, Sanitation uses it to track trash collection. This is because the vast majority of New York City’s snowplows are regular garbage trucks with a plow attached.

The snowstorm presented an outlet for Mamdani’s embrace of “sewer socialism,” which focusses on everyday municipal problems. (It could also be a trip wire: the former mayor John Lindsay was pelted for poorly handling a blizzard in the sixties.) During the storm, Mamdani was shovelling out a car trapped near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The Governor, Kathy Hochul, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting commissioner of sanitation, told me that Mamdani was at morning roll call with the workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor’s shovelling form, “He’s got to bend his knees a little more, maybe.”)

Despite the murkiness of sneckdowns, sanitation workers often end up taking care of them. Back on Broadway, the ice on the corner was, technically, the business’s responsibility. “The fact that it’s on the corner doesn’t change the fact that it’s sidewalk,” Goodman told me. “But we’re doing it—we can’t leave it there.”

Arguing about snow in subfreezing temperatures can remind you of the first law of thermodynamics—that snow can’t be created or destroyed. It has to go somewhere. The curbline may be ugly, but it is where property owners are supposed to put the snow—it’s out of the way. The city also doesn’t clear every sneckdown. “Not all sneckdowns are created equal,” Goodman said. “Some of them are not obstructing anything at all. They can just stay there.” Anyway, the sun usually deals with it for us. We’re only vexed by the sneckdowns now because it’s still freezing. “There is a Foucaultian aspect to it,” Goodman told me. “What’s public and what’s private isn’t inherent. It’s socially constructed. It’s shaped by cultural factors and the fact that it is below thirty-two degrees.”

One way out could be simply to heat the ice. In New York, the city has snow melters, which are just slightly warm trucks, but are commonly called hot tubs. The melter sits over a sewer line, idling while heating the snow to thirty-eight degrees, barely above freezing, and drips the water directly into a drain. The city is running twelve melters; I visited one in Inwood, by the Harlem River, that handles all the snow in Manhattan above Fifty-ninth Street. When I arrived, the melter was surrounded by a pool of water, a few inches deep, which gently lapped against my shoes. Three twelve-foot-tall orange excavators took bites out of a mound of snow and ferried it to the hot tub. It had been so long since I had seen snow melt that it was almost intoxicating. The trucks hauling the snow frolicked in the water, sending dirty gray ripples toward me. I resisted the urge to run my hand through the slush.

Usually, a sneckdown is a fleeting thing. But this year’s never-ending freeze showed that cars could still get around without the extra space. Do we want to live in a world carved out by the sneckdown? “I don’t want the snow there permanently,” Eckerson said. But, he asked, could we imagine the space where the ice sits transforming into concrete and trees, somewhere to rest, or a spot for children to safely cross the street? “You can make them pretty,” he said. “Bushes, trees, seating, if there’s a big enough street.”

Earlier, in Washington Heights, I’d asked the shovellers whether they could imagine the sneckdown before them as something else. “I think that New York City is a pedestrian and transit city, so I’m a hundred per cent behind that,” Johannes, the construction worker, said. “But that takes up the space for the cars,” his fellow-shoveller, Gutierrez, said. “The traffic is a nightmare. It’s not good. You don’t get anywhere to park.” Gutierrez continued, “You fix one thing, you mess up the other stuff.”

Over the days, I saw my local sneckdown more than I saw my friends and family. I watched it yellow slightly, like the fingers of a smoker. But on Monday I walked to Gates Avenue, and my sneckdown was gone. The curb showed evidence of scraping. I sailed through the intersection. It felt slightly unfair to me that it hadn’t been given an honest chance to melt. But the air was still frigid, and there was plenty of snow to step around. ♦

Last week, the top federal judge in Minnesota accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of violating nearly a hundred court orders in the month of January. In a ruling that was part of a contempt case involving Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, wrote, “ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.” ICE, Schiltz added, “is not a law unto itself.” The ruling marks perhaps the most serious turn in an ongoing battle between federal courts and the White House, with the Trump Administration often appearing to blatantly ignore court orders, or to comply with them only after being repeatedly warned to do so.

I recently spoke by phone with Ryan Goodman, who is a law professor at N.Y.U., the co-editor-in-chief of the law-and-policy journal Just Security, and a former special counsel at the Department of Defense during the Obama Administration. He and his colleagues at Just Security have been cataloguing examples of the Trump Administration’s defiance of court orders since the start of the President’s second term. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what the Trump Administration is trying to accomplish with its disregard for the judiciary, the emergence of an alternative legal system for ICE detainees, and the Supreme Court’s reluctance to rein in Trump.

What stuck out to you most about the Minnesota judge’s ruling?

The part that stuck out the most to me is that Schiltz is a Republican-appointed judge, and he is systematically documenting noncompliance with federal district-court orders—in the immigration context, and especially when it comes to habeas corpus. He’s calling out the gravity of the situation, in which, as he says, there are likely more violations of court orders on ICE’s part in one month than in some agencies during their entire lifetime. Stephen Miller suggested, in May, that the Administration was “looking at” suspending habeas corpus. Now, lo and behold, what Judge Schiltz is describing is a form of effectively suspending habeas corpus. And Schlitz is certainly not alone in this judgment. There are other judges in Minnesota who have called attention to this phenomenon in very similar terms, describing it not just at the individual-case level, but at the system-wide level.

What, specifically, is Judge Schiltz accusing ICE of doing? Can you give an example?

What he is calling out, in his particular case, is that the court is ordering someone to be released from ICE detention, and the government’s not releasing them. It’s that significant—fundamental liberty is at stake. And then he is referring to seventy-three other cases that all include possible habeas-corpus violations, i.e., very similar patterns of either the court ordering the government to release somebody and them not being released, or the court ordering the government to present the person to the court physically, and them not being allowed to leave detention, or the court ordering someone not to be taken out of its jurisdiction. That’s the very definition of habeas corpus—to bring the body to the court. And they haven’t been doing that. There’s another very pernicious pattern that arises in these cases, which is that the court orders the government not to transfer the individual out of their jurisdiction, and the government goes ahead and transfers them out of their jurisdiction anyway, often to Texas, where there’s a more favorable judicial climate, which can effectively deny the person their real rights before the court in Minnesota.

Does the sheer frequency with which this is happening suggest that ignoring court orders has become an ICE policy of sorts?

It can’t just be happenstance. They’re carrying it out in a way that makes it a policy by default. I should also note that there are multiple judges who have found that the government’s actions are “willful,” and “willful” is a trigger word because it means it’s deliberate, and that’s what could lead to charges of criminal contempt. And multiple judges are, in fact, saying that they might hold the government in criminal contempt. One of the judges who flagged this in particular is Judge Mary McElroy, who is a Trump-appointed district judge. And last week, she issued a ruling that said she has no way to avoid concluding that the government is willfully violating her orders.

But in Schiltz’s ruling, he rescinded an order that had called the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, to appear in court and explain why he should not be held in contempt. Why?

I think judges are being very careful. If they hold the government in contempt, and the government still doesn’t abide by the court orders, we might very well be in a constitutional crisis. The judges appear to be hoping upon hope that if they threaten contempt, the government will come into line, either in the individual case before the judge or across the board.

So they do not want a constitutional crisis, but what is the alternative? You tiptoe around it and hope that the government comes into compliance by baby steps?

That’s right. It’s a very sensitive interaction. And, in some of these cases, with the threats, the government has come into compliance. But, at a certain point, it does seem as though the courts are going to have to take that next step, which is civil or criminal contempt against individuals. They also have the capacity to refer individuals for disciplinary measures, and they can disqualify particular Justice Department attorneys from handling certain cases before their courts—reputational hits for some of these individuals. I think that will be the next escalation.

There was a lot of discussion last year about the Trump Administration ignoring the courts. My own feeling from following the issue had been that they would walk up to the line in most instances, and then, in the rare cases where the Supreme Court ruled against them, they would comply. It seems like the Trump Administration wants to show that it can be uncompliant, but it doesn’t want to actually spark something that would create a huge drama or constitutional crisis, pitting it against the Supreme Court. Is that your understanding?

I do think they are playing a game of pushing it as close to the line as they can. I also think, in some instances, it is actually just gross incompetence or internal miscommunications. For instance, the Department of Justice lawyers might tell D.H.S. not to transfer somebody to another jurisdiction, but the communication doesn’t reach them in a timely fashion.

In the higher-stakes cases, the Justice Department is doing something more egregious. They do appear to be defying court orders to effectuate a policy. The key case for that is the Alien Enemies Act case, which came before Judge Boasberg. This happened within the first several hours of the President’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, in March. It’s about the flights that took off to El Salvador to bring those people alleged to be Venezuelan gang members to the CECOT torture prison.

Erez Reuveni, a D.O.J. lawyer and whistle-blower, revealed what happened behind the scenes, including text messages that corroborate his account. He alleges, with strong evidence, that it was a deliberate policy to, no matter what, get those people to El Salvador, even if there were court orders preventing their deportation. According to Reuveni, Emil Bove, a Trump loyalist at the D.O.J., had said in a meeting before the hearings that they would have to consider telling the courts, “Fuck you.” And then there’s contemporaneous text messaging between the D.O.J. attorneys during the oral hearing, in which they say that this is the “fuck you” moment. [Bove has testified that he does not recall saying this.] It’s just very clear, based on these allegations, what happened there. So I think that, to me, that would be the constitutional-crisis moment, that a case would get to the Supreme Court and they would do that to a Supreme Court order. They think they can get away with it more when it’s in district courts.

This feels like one area among many where, even if we aren’t yet in a worst-case scenario, or we convince ourselves that we are not, if you told someone ten years ago what was going on, they would think, Oh, well, that is a worst-case scenario.

Absolutely, yes, I think that’s right. Coming into this Administration, I was worried about some of the things that this Administration could do that would constitute crossing the red line. That would include open defiance of a court order. And here we are in the dozens. So I do think we’re in a new normal, and I do worry that the public has been desensitized to how concerning this is. But, going back to the subject of immigration, the defiance of these court orders is creating a lawless situation that I think judges are rightly concerned about. Another district court judge in Minnesota, Michael Davis, accused the government of attempting to undermine the regulatory and statutory authority of the immigration courts to coerce perpetual, infinite detention. So I think it really is setting up a parallel system of immigration detention that exists in defiance of the courts.

Do you mean that they’re essentially normalizing a practice where detainees do not get their time in court?

I’m definitely concerned about that. I think the reason the system is still holding is that we have instances in which the courts, by threatening civil and criminal contempt, are able to bring the government back into line. [The Times reported last weekend that hundreds of detainees have now been released from immigration detention after habeas petitions began filling up the federal-court dockets.] We have a court concluding that a government’s in flagrant violation of its orders, while still being able to coerce the government back into place. That’s the kind of knife’s edge we’re on right now.

What’s happening in the courtroom is part of a broader slide towards lawlessness, because defiance of court orders is connected to another ICE policy: the agency repeatedly states that its entire system of arrest is based on reasonable suspicion. And that is legally invalid because arrests have to be based on probable cause. A D.C. district-court judge, Beryl Howell, chastised the agency for this in December, summarizing several instances in which D.H.S. had repeatedly said that ICE arrests were based on reasonable suspicion, and they continue to do it. They’ve done it as recently as the past couple of weeks.

What’s the difference between reasonable suspicion and probable cause?

Reasonable suspicion is similar to stop-and-frisk policies, in which a law-enforcement officer can stop somebody very briefly and ask them questions on the basis of a low threshold of evidence. But actually arresting somebody and putting them in custody requires a much higher level of proof, which is probable cause. In the immigration context, to apprehend and detain someone for a long time, they’d need to have more than a reasonable suspicion, meaning much greater evidence indicating that the person is in the country unlawfully. So, for them to state and restate again and again that they’re basing their arrests on reasonable suspicion is like a failing answer on the bar exam. And they’re doing that continually, despite the court calling them out for it.

It is also important to note that D.H.S. has authorized ICE agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant. To me, these two policies are putting ICE operations on the road to a very different form of legal system than the one we’re used to. They’re breaking rules.

Probable cause is from the Fourth Amendment, right? Where does reasonable suspicion come from?

Both of them are straight out of Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his recent opinion in Trump v. Illinois, goes out of his way in a footnote to reiterate that an arrest has to be based on probable cause. And he’s specifically talking about ICE operations.

You said the country would be at risk of a constitutional crisis if the White House ignored a Supreme Court order. Is there a reason that an Administration ignoring Supreme Court orders is worse than ignoring lower court orders?

I one-hundred-per-cent think that ignoring lower-court orders breaks the system. Having independent judges is crucial to the design of our system of checks and balances. If the lower courts are ignored, then the system cannot work. And that leads to the accumulation of enormous power in one branch of government.

Is there a way that the Supreme Court can support lower courts without actually presiding over these immigration cases? It seems like this would be going differently if, after the Administration ignored these rulings, the Supreme Court were there to enforce them. But my understanding is that this isn’t how it works.

Right. Our system moves very slowly, and, by design, the Court will only take cases that are brought to it at a particular point with a particular dispute. So it doesn’t speak generally or in the abstract until a case makes it all the way up. That’s part of the problem. That said, there is one very significant tool it can use to signal its disapproval: the presumption of regularity. The courts give the executive branch the benefit of the doubt in many cases, including, for example, when prosecutions are accused of being selective or vindictive. The government benefits enormously from this presumption. At some point, the Supreme Court could do what judges in the lower courts have started to do, which is to hold that these kinds of flagrant violations of court orders mean that the Trump Administration is forfeiting its presumption. And the district courts have already started saying that, which is extraordinary.

I would summarize much of what the Supreme Court has done over the past year as treating the Trump Administration as if it were behaving like a normal Administration.

I think that’s exactly what the Supreme Court is doing. That’s why they have a card that they can still play, which is to no longer treat the Trump Administration normally. They could say, “We recognize these are extraordinary circumstances and that the government is behaving aberrantly, so the courts are going to have to respond.” And I think that’s one of the last things the Trump Administration wants. They want to win these cases, when they get to the Supreme Court, on the merits. So, that’s one of the signals that the Justices could start to send.

But you agree that they’ve certainly not sent that signal so far.

Absolutely not.

I know you’ve been keeping track of how often the Administration has been defying court orders. Are there other cases that we should be paying attention to?

Some of the cases that were most notable for me included ones where Republican-appointed judges called out the Administration for, say, destroying Voice of America against a judge’s orders. Judge Lamberth threatened to hold Kari Lake, who oversaw the network’s parent agency, in contempt for failing to turn over information to the court. Or when Judge Mary McElroy ruled similarly about the Administration’s flagrant disregard for her orders to unfreeze funds appropriated by the Inflation Reduction Act. She’s a Trump appointee. Those are the ones that seem to suggest that the system is under real threat.

Can you think of any previous Administration that has behaved similarly to the current Trump Administration?

I can think of other Administrations that skirted and failed to enforce the law. But it’s hard to think of specific examples in which a recent Administration engaged in flagrant violations of court orders.

We know Administrations have broken the law in the past. I don’t want to sound naïve. But, when they are called before a court and a judge tells them what they have to do, that’s where, broadly speaking, the rubber has met the road.

Yes, exactly. And I think that under other Administrations, the judge might say, “I want to have a hearing because the plaintiffs have proven that the Administration needs to show why it is not in contempt of court.” And normal Administrations would bring themselves into line to avoid a judicial determination that they’re actually acting in noncompliance. That seems to be the qualitative difference with the Trump Administration. They’ve broken through to the next line, which is very unusual on its own terms, but it’s also happening at a scale that’s truly extraordinary. And I think that’s why we have these judges sounding the alarm.

I should say that I did think this defiance was dying down to some degree. But in the past two months, amid this surge in ICE activity, that has changed. It’s even become very hard for us, as a research team, to catalogue all the times the Administration has defied court orders, because it is now happening at such a high number across the country. ♦

Every morning, in group chats that connect neighbors across the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, people count off the days since President Donald Trump ordered a surge of immigration agents into Minnesota in early December. It has been more than sixty days now, during which Minneapolis has borne witness to events that once might have been unthinkable. The Department of Homeland Security has said that the three thousand agents in Minnesota represent the largest domestic operation in the agency’s history. What that has looked like in the city is equally unprecedented: chemical irritants sprayed into the faces of observers, through the streets of residential neighborhoods, and on the grounds of a local high school; masked and armed men smashing the car windows of anti-ICE activists and taking them into detention; and three shootings of Minneapolis residents by federal agents in three weeks, two of them fatal.

Philip Cheung has covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine and last year’s fires in Los Angeles, where he lives. He also photographed the massive street protests that emerged in response to the surge of ICE agents in Los Angeles last June. In Minneapolis, he has captured local residents’ evolving resistance to the immigration agents in their midst. Following federal agents’ movements through the city and into Saint Paul and Maple Grove, Cheung has also watched the federal response evolve. At times, he told me, federal agents seemed to welcome photographic attention, as on a day when Gregory Bovino, then the commander-at-large of Customs and Border Patrol, who has since been ousted and transferred out of state, effectively led reporters and local observers on a daylong tour of the city, with stops for active confrontation along the way.

Over the course of their time in the city, the agents have adapted ways to disguise themselves, switching from large S.U.V.s with tinted windows to less conspicuous vehicles; they apparently used one convoy as a decoy to lure observers away from a location as other agents arrived to carry out an arrest. Cheung has also documented the haphazard quality of the operation, as in one photograph showing a gun magazine left in the snow after agents departed from a scene.

Cheung said that security was on his mind to an unusual degree for a domestic project. “We haven’t really seen anything like this happen before in the U.S., where peaceful protesters were murdered on the street by federal agents,” he said. “I went into the situation with the mind-set of going into a conflict zone.” He and other photographers checked in regularly with one another. “You’re often on your own, so it was nice to be able to form our safety nets.”

Many immigrant families in Minnesota are in hiding right now, regardless of their legal status, for fear that they will be detained or deported without a chance to prove their cases. Local media has reported that off-duty police, government workers, and teen-agers have been stopped by agents demanding proof of citizenship. Congressional observers who have tried to get inside the interior of the Whipple Federal Building, where immigration agents hold the people they’ve arrested before sending them to a network of jails and detention centers in Minnesota and out of state, were told that they needed to give seven days’ notice to be allowed in. (A February 2nd court opinion has ordered the D.H.S. to fully restore congressional oversight.)

Outside the building, activists collect the license plates of federal vehicles moving in and out into a database that is widely shared; they shout their anger and discontent. Cast by the Trump Administration as agitators—or “insurrectionists,” or “domestic terrorists” or “paid professionals”—they see themselves as concerned citizens. Every day, for eight weeks and counting, they have continued to show up.