The Real Reason ICE Agents Wear Masks
Masked men with guns are swarming through American cities. They are doing so in the name of enforcing immigration law. There is no justification, however, for federal agents to hide their identity from the public that pays for their weapons.
In an interview with CNN, Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, who has become an occasional Trump critic, said that he didn’t have a problem with federal agents wearing masks. “I’ve seen people dox me. I’ve seen people take pictures and identify law-enforcement officers and then put their families at risk,” Tillis said. Requiring agents to take off, or even pull down, their mask, he suggested, would endanger their safety—“I think that’s a step too far.”
Doxxing—which traditionally means the public exposure of an ordinary person’s identity and home address, and threats that harassment or even violence will follow that exposure—is a common technique in online bullying. Although exposing someone’s home address is clearly menacing, the concept of “doxxing” cannot apply to simply knowing the identity of public-facing government employees, especially not those empowered to use force.
Tillis’s logic illustrates how distorted the American approach to law enforcement has become. Police officers are civilians; they are public servants, not above the public. It is part of the job of police—and, for that matter, politicians—to be identifiable, because of the profound authority bestowed upon them. The ability to use force is a weighty responsibility, requiring high standards of conduct, and it can and should be revoked when abused. It is not “doxxing” federal agents for the public to know who they are. We are supposed to know who they are, because that is how we hold them accountable. This is why police officers wear visible badge numbers and name tags. The responsibilities they are given are not compatible with anonymity.
Ordinary police officers do not wear masks except in extremely rare and specific circumstances. This is the case even though, statistically, regular police officers are at far greater risk than immigration agents. According to an analysis by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute based on data from last year, “law enforcement officers who don’t work at ICE or Border Patrol have a death rate 6.3 times higher than that of immigration enforcement officers.” In fact, the report found, immigration agents are at no greater risk than regular people: “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.”
If there were law-enforcement agencies particularly ill-suited to anonymity, it would be Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. From 2005 to 2024, nearly 5,000 CBP and Border Patrol officers were arrested, according to the journalist Garrett Graff, who testified about his findings to an accountability commission set up by the governor of Illinois. Information on the multitude of corruption-related charges faced by agents can be found on the CBP’s own website. “The crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States,” Graff writes.” Statistically speaking, “worst of the worst” seems to describe CBP and the Border Patrol as law-enforcement agencies better than it does the people they’re rounding up.
ICE does not have the same history of criminal behavior, but it does share a long record of abusing its powers and mistreating people in its custody. Put succinctly, these agencies deal with people the American system has frequently treated as barely human. Now these agents have been unleashed on Americans. Putting masks on people in agencies with internal cultures like these was always a recipe for catastrophe. The Trump administration took the most corrupt, poorly trained, and impulsive law-enforcement agencies in the country, gave them masks, and turned them against American cities.
Politicians, likewise, do not cover their face, though death threats—which should have no place in public discourse—have become far more common. It would nonetheless be absurd to conceal lawmakers’ identity, because then people would not know whom to hold responsible for public policy. Lawmakers do not vote by secret ballot, because they would be able to ignore popular preferences without fearing any consequences. That applies as much to police as it does to politicians. The public has a right to know the identity of the people who wield power in their name, so that they can withdraw that power from those who abuse or misuse it. If people can wield power over life and death without showing their face, we have a gang of criminals—not a police force.
The unhinged behavior that we have seen from federal immigration officials, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot while drawing attention to or recording agents’ behavior, is a direct consequence of power without accountability. On Sunday, ProPublica revealed the names of the two agents involved in the Pretti shooting: Border Patrol officer Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Suffice it to say that two Hispanic Americans killing a white person trying to prevent them from harassing or deporting other Hispanic people, on the orders of Stephen Miller—a Jewish American whose ancestors fled pogroms in Eastern Europe—is a uniquely grotesque expression of the American melting pot in action.
Although the Department of Justice reversed course on Friday and promised an actual investigation of Pretti’s killing, President Trump has already eliminated traditional restraints on political control over criminal prosecutions and investigations, and Trump officials have already declared Pretti to be a terrorist and his killers to be innocent. Other Trump officials have loudly announced that federal agents have “absolute immunity” in the execution of their duties. Legal immunity plus anonymity equals impunity. It would be logical to think that in that situation, agents could literally get away with murder.
But the consequences of masked immigration agents’ extreme behavior go beyond those two fatal shootings. Thousands of students in the Twin Cities have stopped going to school and are in hiding with their families. The great majority of Somali and Hispanic residents of the Twin Cities area have legal status, but that seems to make no difference: Federal agents are indiscriminately stopping, detaining, and arresting people on the basis of little more than their accent or skin color, in violation of their due-process rights, a lawsuit from the ACLU contends. In Salem, Oregon, an American was hospitalized after reportedly being dragged from her car by immigration agents demanding her papers; she is among the dozens of Americans who, ProPublica reported in October, have been physically abused or detained for extended periods by immigration agents. The real number was probably greater then; it is certainly greater now.
Even regular cops are not immune to being profiled by ICE and the Border Patrol. “We’ve had many instances of people being stopped, family members of police officers being stopped that are American citizens,“ Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told The New York Times. “They’re not stopping family members of folks who are Norwegian or Irish. That’s not happening.” Twin Cities residents being racially profiled by federal agents can thank Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who blew a giant hole in the Fourteenth Amendment in a shadow-docket case in September. A later attempt by Kavanaugh to walk back his disastrous concurrence hasn’t altered federal agents’ conduct.
When violating the Constitution on a daily basis a mask helps, because people who are assured that they won’t face consequences for abusing power almost inevitably do so. One wonders if this is actually the government’s purpose in masking them. When you are asking men to essentially make war on their fellow citizens—to force lightly dressed people out into the frigid Minneapolis winter, detain elementary schoolers, follow good Samaritans as they deliver food to hiding families, and drag, tackle, beat, tase, or even shoot American citizens—you may find telling them that they can keep their identity hidden useful. The masks may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to to make it easier for them to do unspeakable things.