A masked, unaccountable secret police force is poisonous to liberal democracy.
A common excuse used by the Trump administration is that the masks are necessary because their agents are facing unprecedented danger, doxxing, etc. Garrett Graff has a great piece going through why that's all a lie.
Some highlights from the article:
"A CATO Institute study last month found that 2025 — in theory a wildly dangerous year, according to Kristi Noem and other administration officials, when threats and assault against agents and officers leapt by insane astronomical figures, like 413 percent, 1150 percent, or even 8000 percent!!!! — was actually the second-safest year ever for ICE officers and Border Patrol agents.
In fact, CATO calculated, “The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered. We should be much less concerned about their safety.”
…
Which is to say: Being an elementary school student in the United States is more deadly than being an ICE officer.
The leading cause of “on-duty death” of ICE officers? Covid.
…
Nothing is more fundamental to the myth that working for ICE is a dangerous, high-risk occupation than the lore of the masks. The masks, we’re told, are a critical part of protecting the identity of ICE and CBP officers, protecting them from the vague threat of “doxxing,” which presumably could lead to their assault or attacks against their families.
Except, as Philip Bump so thoughtfully and carefully investigated, “A review of DHS and ICE press releases since January 2025, though, indicates that this theoretical scenario has never actually occurred. At no point in time has an officer been seen conducting his work, identified and subsequently attacked.”
Moreover, it’s worth pointing out that up until last year, ICE officers didn’t routinely cover their faces — it’s only been with their rise in aggression and violence on America’s streets that they now operate in such a state of fear that they say they need to be masked. It’s a remarkable and troubling statement about how ICE and CBP have lost moral legitimacy in the eyes of the nation, so much so that agents now fear anyone ever associating themselves with being employed by ICE or CBP. (Plus, as Adam Serwer has argued at The Atlantic, it seems like the masks, more than anything, are a license for impunity and brutality: “Face coverings may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to make it easier for them to do unconstitutional things.”)
It should go without saying that if you can’t police in a free society without hiding your face, the problem is with the policing — not the public.
…
In the darkest corners of their hearts, it seems clear that ICE and CBP want their own Horst Wessel moment — a martyr they can celebrate and hold up, their “I told you so” moment to justify their own aggression and violence against American communities.
If you read between the lines of comments and complaints by Miller, Noem, Homan, and Bovino, you can almost sense their frustration at how peaceful the national resistance to ICE has actually been — they have done everything they can to provoke violence, and it’s all fallen short. Day after day, they tell us how the aggression is necessary because of how dangerous the work is — except that it’s not and their evidence keeps crumbling. They’re not staring down cartel death squads — they’re facing inflatable frogs and men in Blackhawk pajamas.
…
Of all the possible reforms the Congress should insist upon this week at DHS — and I laid out my own suggested reform agenda last week — there’s nothing more meaningful or concrete than banning immigration officers from using masks. It would force ICE and CBP to operate completely differently and remove the cloak of impunity they’ve created for themselves over the last year.
But whenever we settle the question of masks, here’s a more interesting question for reformers: Why, given the reality of the role, should ICE officers be armed at all?
If you truly want to re-imagine ICE, it’s not entirely clear why what is actually a civil matter — immigration enforcement — should be considered armed federal law enforcement at all? If and when ICE officers actually are going after the so-called “worst of the worst” — which DHS’s own statistics underscore is an increasingly rare case at all, given that just 14 percent of Trump arrests have a violent criminal record — it could always enlist the help of local, state, or other federal armed agents, partners who would presumably be involved anyway in cases that truly did focus on gang members, drug smugglers, murderers, rapists, or human traffickers — and a move that, among other things, would help ensure that ICE officers actually view local and state partners as just that."
Posted by loremipsumot