The Quota

Bands of masked, heavily armed men roam the streets.

They are hunting. Dangerous people.

At first, they are told exactly what they are hunting for: criminal immigrants.

They are promised abundance. Easy work. A target-rich environment.

Three thousand hunters are deployed.

They are organized into five hundred teams of six. Each team is given a quota: twelve arrests per month. Six thousand arrests, every month, no excuses. They are authorized to capture their prey by any means necessary.

But numbers don’t bend forever.

Where the hunters are sent, violent crime is already falling. Total violent crime stands at roughly fifteen thousand incidents per year. Immigrants account for about four percent of that number.

That leaves roughly fifty “violent immigrant criminals” per month.

Fifty.

Local law enforcement is already identifying, investigating, and arresting those cases—month after month, year after year.

The hunters learn the truth too late: the prey is scarce. Statistically insignificant. Functionally nonexistent.

And hunters without prey don’t survive.

So they adapt.

The target changes.

Now any Black, Brown, or Asian person becomes potential prey. That population is plentiful—about 1.2 million people in the territory. Within it are roughly 435,000 immigrants, the overwhelming majority of the immigrant population. Of those, some fraction are undocumented.

The math begins to work again.

Stop one hundred people. Every third might be an immigrant. Of those, every third again might be undocumented. Ten arrests. Enough to justify the stop. Enough to meet the quota.

Enough to keep the hunt alive.

The shift aligns neatly with the instincts of many newer, less-qualified hunters, equally armed men with dark tattoos: swastikas, lightning bolts, “88.” Men who mutter slogans about replacement, about us versus them. Men fluent in dehumanization.

So the profile changes.

From violent immigrant criminals.

To anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant. 

They look like everyone else.

So the hunt resumes.

But now the prey is different. 

They are not hiding in shadows or alleyways. They are embedded in society. They build houses. Cook food. Harvest crops. Clean hospital rooms. Care for the elderly. Their children go to school. They shop at grocery stores. They live ordinary lives.

The hunters learn where to go: roofing crews, farms, restaurants, retail stores, hospitals. They target neighborhoods where the prey is concentrated. Communities become hunting grounds.

Even legal status becomes flexible. Rules shift daily. Refuge is revoked. Visas evaporate. Documentation can be questioned, dismissed, or ignored. A deportation is a deportation—still credit toward the quota.

Citizens are taken too. Many “look like” immigrants. They live alongside them. That collateral damage is deemed unavoidable.

The hunters expect mistakes. Rights will be violated. Innocent people will be arrested. But they are armed. They control the encounter. They are not reluctant to use force.

Results have a cost.

Then something unexpected happens.

The neighbors notice.

They notice the unmarked vehicles circling the same blocks. The masked men watching school drop-offs. Coworkers vanishing mid-shift. Parents taken in front of children. Patients disappearing from hospital rooms.

They understand quickly: this is not law enforcement.

This is a hunt.

Word spreads. Doors open. People step outside – not armed, not masked. They film. They whistle. They shout names. They demand warrants. They place their bodies between the hunters and their neighbors.

The hunters do not like being seen.

At first they threaten. Then they shove. Then they strike. They insist they are authorized, protected, immune. They remind everyone who carries the weapons.

But the communities do not scatter.

They surround vans. They block exits. They refuse to look away.

And then someone named Renee dies.

It is chaotic. A shouted order. A raised weapon. A split second framed as “fear,” “resistance,” “confusion.” Four shots fired. A woman dead, in her car, surrounded by her child’s toys, her dog in the back seat.

Then another neighbor.

A man stepping in to help women being assaulted in the name of clearing the street. Pulled into the road by five men. Forced to the pavement. Beaten. Searched. A legal weapon found. An instant execution—shots to the back. How dare you carry a gun to a…

The neighbor, a nurse, collapses in the street, dead. While the killers count the bullet holes in the body.

The hunters retreat—but only briefly.

Each killing is explained away. Justified. Buried in paperwork and language designed to drain it of meaning: officer safety, escalation, threat perception.

But the neighborhoods know what they are watching.

Will the next raid is louder? Faster? More aggressive? Another death? Then another?

This is no longer about quotas alone.

It is about control through fear.

Funerals could fill churches and school gyms. Photos could appear on fences and street corners. Names would be spoken aloud so they cannot be erased.

The quotas remain.

Six thousand arrests a month.

Speed begins to matter more than precision. Force more than law. More hunters arrive—armored, prepared, expecting submission.

Instead, they encounter resistance shaped by grief.

Workplaces shut down. Streets fill. Neighbors stand in daylight, phones raised, names shouted, witnesses multiplying. The hunt no longer happens unseen.

The violence continues – but it no longer belongs only to those carrying weapons.

The lie that sustained the hunt – the promise of endless threat, abundant prey – collapses under what everyone can now see: the bodies do not match the story. They are citizens. Neighbors. Children.

The hunters were trained to believe they were pursuing criminals.

What they are facing now are communities.

And the difference matters.

So the question is no longer how many arrests can be made.

It is how long a system built on fear can operate once it is exposed.

Will the hunt end when quotas lose their meaning?

When force replaces law entirely?

Or when those being hunted decide they will no longer face it alone?

That is where the story stops.

Because the outcome no longer belongs to the hunters