The rumor mill—that creaking, rusted engine of modern American discourse—has spat out a particularly delicious morsel of late: the impending arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the city of Philadelphia. To the uninitiated, or perhaps to those who still believe in the sterile efficiency of federal acronyms, this might sound like a standard deployment of the administrative state. But to anyone who has spent more than five minutes breathing the unique, cheesesteak-scented air of the Delaware Valley, the prospect is less a law enforcement operation and more a tragicomic collision course between a clinical bureaucracy and a populace that views polite society as an optional suggestion.

One cannot help but admire the sheer, unadulterated hubris of the federal government. There is a specific kind of intellectual blindness required to believe that a group of agents, armed with nothing but badges and a sense of institutional self-importance, can successfully navigate a city that famously booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs. One finds a certain grim amusement in the collision of clinical federal ambition and the primordial soup that is Philadelphia. The local reaction to these rumors has been remarkably uniform, distilled into a sentiment that is part warning and part sociological diagnosis: “Philly people are a different breed.”

Indeed, they are. While other cities might respond to federal intervention with organized protests or legal injunctions, Philadelphia responds with a brand of feral defiance that makes one wonder if the Enlightenment ever actually crossed the Atlantic. The internet, that repository of human folly, has reached a rare consensus. The general theory is that ICE agents won’t be the ones doing the rounding up; rather, they will find themselves trapped in a topographical nightmare of one-way streets and rowhouses where the very atmosphere is hostile to outsiders. One user noted that “ICE is going to be protesting”—a reversal of roles that suggests the hunters will quickly realize they are, in fact, the ones being hunted by the sheer, exhausting reality of the city’s temperament.

From my perspective, this entire affair is a perfect microcosm of the collapsing theater of the absurd. On one side, we have the state—an ossified machine attempting to assert control through the blunt instrument of deportation. On the other, we have a citizenry whose primary cultural export is a mascot named Gritty, a creature that looks like it was birthed from the fever dream of a nihilistic muppet. It is the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, if the object were covered in grease and shouting obscenities. The irony, of course, is that both sides are operating within a framework of complete delusion. The federal government believes it can impose order on a city that thrives on chaos, and the locals believe their particular brand of urban savagery is a form of noble resistance. In reality, it is simply two different flavors of dysfunction rubbing against each other until heat is generated.

History tells us that empires do not fall to grand armies; they crumble when the center can no longer enforce its will on the periphery. If Philadelphia is the periphery, then the American center is in significant trouble. There is no manual in Washington D.C. for dealing with a population that views a greased light pole as a personal challenge. The rumors of ICE’s arrival have done nothing but galvanize a collective identity forged in the fires of sports-related riots and a perpetual sense of being the underdog. It is a fascinating, if somewhat repulsive, study in human behavior. The bureaucratic mind seeks to categorize and deport; the Philadelphia mind seeks to complicate and antagonize.

I told you so, of course. This is the logical conclusion of the American experiment: a federal agency paralyzed by the prospect of entering a city where the inhabitants would rather dismantle their own infrastructure than concede an inch to an outsider. It is not a clash of ideologies; it is a clash of vibrations. And the vibration currently emanating from Philadelphia is one of pure, unrefined hostility. Should these rumors prove true, the inevitable result will not be a triumph of law and order, but a series of bureaucratic retreats and confused agents wondering why their tires have been replaced with cinder blocks. It is a marvelous spectacle, really. One can only hope the cameras are rolling when the clinical precision of the federal government meets the jagged, battery-throwing edge of the City of Brotherly Shove. In the end, the only thing being deported will be the government’s dignity.