On November 2013, two civil disobediences occurred in the Chicago area within days of each other. In the first one, planned by a mainstream immigrant rights organization, dozens of participants sat on a downtown street, holding hands and chanting "2 million [deportations] too many". After a brief period, the Chicago police (who had been notified of this action and had the names of all participants in advance), led each participant to the side. They handed each one a ticket, and the protestors went home. A few days later and a few miles away, 12 people blocked a bus taking immigrants from a processing center (where immigrants are processed before deportation) to the airport to be deported. They did this by connecting themselves to PVC pipes, sitting down, and attaching the pipes to each other or to a bus tire. They did not give prior notice to ICE or the Broadview police. A surprised security guard pushed several of the protestors to the ground. The bus driver, losing his patience, tried to move forward a couple of times, forcing the protesters grabbing the tires to release themselves and reconnect once the bus was stopped again. It took the police and several first responders about four hours to cut through the PVC pipes and arrest all the protestors. The protestors were in jail for several hours and faced serious charges. Since this incident, their records have been utilized by immigration agents to chastise and threaten at least three of the participants traveling back to the U.S.: two of them were DACA recipients, and one of them was a legal permanent resident.What explains these different actions? While both would be classified as civil disobedience, the former was a staged civil disobedience that allowed the state significant control over the action, while the latter was not. These two moments exemplify distinct approaches in the immigrant rights movement, which are reflected in different tactics, even when they both engage in the strategy of civil disobedience. We argue that these differences are not insignificant, but reveal a very different kind of politics between mainstream immigrant rights mobilization and anti-deportation activism.While intra-movement differences in political orientation and strategies have been present prior to 2006, comprehensive immigration reform remained a consistently shared goal between 2006 and 2010. However, since 2010, there has been a bifurcation of movement objectives as one sector of the movement, strongly influenced and financed by beltway organizations, has continued the course toward comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), and the other, the anti-deportation movement, has focused on stopping deportations, primarily through strategies involving non-staged civil disobedience actions and anti-deportation campaigns. 1