Timothy Snyder spent his career studying how democracies collapse. He wrote a short book so the rest of us wouldn’t repeat the mistake. Surprise, Arizona Mayor Kevin Sartor is ignoring every word of it.
In 2017, Yale historian Timothy Snyder published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century — a slim, urgent guide drawn from the wreckage of European democracies that gave way to fascism and authoritarianism. It sold over a million copies. You could read it in an afternoon. It had one central argument: the people who enable tyranny rarely think of themselves as enablers. They think of themselves as realists.
Surprise, Arizona Mayor Kevin Sartor is a realist.
In January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security paid $70 million in cash for a 418,000-square-foot warehouse in Surprise — a fast-growing suburb of Phoenix — and announced plans to retrofit it into an ICE detention facility. The contract to do the work, awarded to GardaWorld Federal Services, is worth $313 million. The facility hasn’t opened yet. The retrofitting will soon be underway. And the community that will live in its shadow has been fighting back at every city council meeting since the day the news broke.
Their mayor has not been fighting with them.
Timothy Snyder had a word for that. Actually, he had twenty. Here are the three that matter most right now — not just for Surprise, but for every community watching this story from their own city council chambers.
Lesson 1
“Do not obey in advance.”
Snyder opens his book with this lesson because it is the most important one. Most of the power of authoritarianism, he writes, is freely given — by ordinary people who anticipate what an authoritarian government will want and offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts this way is teaching power what it can do.
Mayor Sartor did not wait to be asked. He organized a delegation to Washington, D.C. He sat down with DHS officials and sought terms. He accepted verbal assurances — no enforcement near schools, single adults only, three to seven days of detention — that were never put in binding written form. Then he held a press conference to tell residents that his meeting represented “progress” and that he was “confident” the city was now “in the best position moving forward.”
He came home and managed his community’s expectations on behalf of the federal government.
“The federal government purchased the land. Whether we want it here or not, they’re here.” — Mayor Kevin Sartor, March 2026
That sentence is not a statement of fact. It is a choice dressed as a fact. Sartor made it before he heard from DHS, before a single legal avenue had been explored, before anyone in a position of authority had said the word “no.” He announced surrender and called it leadership.
Lesson 2
“Defend institutions.”
Snyder’s second lesson is deceptively simple: institutions do not protect themselves. They need people willing to use them. When officials refuse to invoke the powers they actually hold, they are not being cautious. They are abandoning the field.
The city of Surprise has tools it has not used. The planned facility sits across the street from a Rinchem chemical storage site holding chlorine, hydrofluoric acid, and fluorine at federally regulated levels. That facility’s Risk Management Plan was written before DHS purchased its Surprise warehouse, and the plan does not account for people who cannot self-evacuate. Federal law requires updated planning. The DHS warehouse site seems to have bypassed the environmental review process that federal law mandates. The city’s own zoning code raises serious incompatible-use questions. Its water ordinance may have been triggered by the scale of the planned facility.
Not one of these levers has been pulled.
Instead, Sartor told reporters in February that “any city codes, zoning, any state law that we have, just doesn’t apply” when the federal government is involved. That is a remarkable statement — and it is legally wrong. Local governments have successfully used environmental law, zoning authority, and infrastructure requirements to challenge federal facilities before. A federal judge in Maryland did exactly that this month, halting an ICE warehouse conversion on environmental review grounds — the same argument Surprise residents have been making for months.
Sartor said local law ‘just doesn’t apply’ when the federal government is involved. That is not a legal analysis. It is a political choice.
When officials declare their own institutions powerless, they make them powerless. That is not pragmatism. That is the abdication Snyder warned about.
Lesson 18
“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”
This lesson is about a specific and insidious move that authoritarian governments rely on: declaring that something unprecedented is now inevitable, then waiting for people to accept it. Snyder is blunt — the “this is just how it is now” posture is not neutral. It is a political act. Accepting the unthinkable as permanent is how the unthinkable becomes permanent.
Sartor has made this argument explicitly and repeatedly. He told reporters the city could do “little to prevent” the federal use of the facility. He called community opposition “false hope.” He said legal action would be “a waste of resources” and described his approach as “pragmatic.” When asked why he wouldn’t fight harder, he said: “I think people are so polarized on this issue and they’re dug in on their position, so I think no matter what is said or done, you’re not going to make everybody happy.”
That last sentence is especially instructive. It reframes a question about leadership as a question about feelings. The issue is not whether everyone will be happy. The issue is whether a 418,000-square-foot detention facility — planned without community input, without environmental review, next to a chemical hazard site, within three miles of fifteen schools — should be resisted by the people whose job it is to protect this community. Sartor answered that question before anyone asked it.
He has one vote on a seven-member council. He said so himself. “Futility” is a story he is choosing to tell. It is not a fact.
History is full of officials who told that story. Who decided the fight wasn’t worth having, the window wasn’t worth opening, the tools weren’t worth using. They were not being realistic. They were choosing a side and calling it pragmatism. Snyder documented what happened to the communities they left behind.
Snyder did not write On Tyranny for dictators. He wrote it for the people around them — the mayors, the council members, the administrators, the lawyers — who make the whole machinery work by deciding, day after day, that resistance is not their job.
History does not remember them kindly. Not because they chose evil. Because they chose convenience.
What is happening in Surprise is not unique. Warehouses are being purchased and retrofitted into detention facilities in communities across the country. In most of those places, local officials are facing the same choice Mayor Sartor faced: use the tools you have, or explain why you won’t. In most of those places, residents are watching — and taking notes — on which answer their leaders choose.
The residents of Surprise have shown up. Thousands of them, at weekly protests, at the last No Kings protest, at multiple city council meetings, unpaid, unafraid, since the day this news broke. They have packed city chambers. They have organized the largest demonstration in the city’s history. They have spoken in the language of law, of public safety, of community values. They have done their part.
Mayor Sartor has read the situation and decided that the federal government is on one side and his residents are on the other, and that his job is to manage the gap between them rather than stand with one against the other. That is a choice. Snyder would recognize it immediately. So would the residents of Surprise. So, increasingly, will the rest of the country — because what is happening here is coming to a city near you, if it hasn’t already.
Read the book. Know the lessons. And when your mayor shows up at a press conference to explain why surrender is the only option, know what you’re actually watching.
Share this post. The fight in Surprise is not just about Surprise. It is a preview of what happens when authoritarianism arrives at the local level and finds officials unwilling to use the tools they have. Every community deserves to see this playbook before it arrives at their door.
[Photo credit: City of Surprise]