A Black American Leadership Alliance representative was unavailable for comment. The Tea Party Patriots' national coordinator, Jenny Beth Martin, told me the disappearing rallies were not "set in stone," so their listings were removed until they could be finalized. Martin also told ABC News that Tea Party activists are more focused on the push to defund Obamacare than on defeating immigration reform. Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, which claims to be the largest grassroots group against citizenship for undocumented immigrants, previously told me his group was gearing up for a major August mobilization, but in an interview Monday he denied that was ever the goal. "We did not try to organize anything massive," he said.

NumbersUSA has alerted its members to 181 past events, with 70 more scheduled for this week and 142 still to come, involving more than 100 Republican members of Congress. Members have reported back to the group that they felt they were in the majority at 90 percent of the events, Beck told me, based on the way the audience rumbled and booed.

As for the poorly attended Richmond rally, Beck acknowledged it was disappointing, but blamed the lack of turnout on a bad location choice. "We picked a spot that, it turns out, has the highest homicide rate in the city, and apparently a lot of people were afraid to come," he said. Beck seemed to associate this danger with the African-American population: "We wanted to be there at a place where we could talk about the huge population of descendants of slavery who have never yet been part of the American Dream," he said. "But sometimes passion and principles get in the way of practicality."

Beck admitted that his side is not as galvanized as activists were in May of 2007, when an outpouring of grassroots anger -- directed by NumbersUSA -- helped derail the last immigration-reform push. But that's because reform has less chance of passing this time, so activists are less concerned, he said. "This year, it's very much like there's a wildfire out there coming for your town, but everybody knows there's a reservoir between the fire and your town, and that's the House of Representatives," he said. "Everybody has been told by the media the bill is dead on arrival in the House."

In any case, Beck said, all the rallies in the world won't do reform advocates any good if Republican members of Congress aren't taking positions in favor of reform, and that's not happening in a major way. McCarthy said he was for a piecemeal approach, with border security coming first. Tennessee Rep. Scott DesJarlais, confronted by an 11-year-old girl whose father faces deportation, told her it was brave of her to speak, but "we have laws, and we need to follow those laws," to applause from the audience. Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who as chairman of the Judiciary Committee is something of a gatekeeper for immigration policy, reiterated that he does not believe the undocumented should get a "special pathway to citizenship" not available to would-be legal immigrants.