The Trump administration and Democrats are locked in a fierce argument over whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should be allowed to continue wearing masks while conducting operations.
National and local Democratic leaders, as well as immigrant advocates, have criticized the practice, comparing the masked immigration agents to figures from repressive fascist and communist regimes of the past.
“This is America. This is not the Soviet Union,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Tuesday during a press briefing. “We’re not behind the Iron Curtain. This is not the 1930s. And every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will of course be identified.”
The comments, which the White House condemned as “sick,” came after Boston Mayor Michelle Wu compared ICE agents last week to “secret police.”
Meanwhile, Virginia U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine wrote last month to immigration officials, arguing mask use violates Homeland Security regulations and puts “everyone at risk – the targeted individuals, the ICE officers and agents, and bystanders who may misunderstand what is happening and may attempt to intervene.”
The government has insisted such disguises are vital, given what the Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday was a 413 percent spike in assaults against immigration agents.
“When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected gang members, murders, and rapists,” the department wrote in a statement on X.
Earlier this week, acting ICE director Todd Lyons also defended the practice.
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, their family on the line, because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” he said at a news conference in Massachusetts, where immigration officials have been carrying out large-scale arrest operations over the last month.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, announced legislation on Wednesday that would make doxxing law enforcement illegal.
“Blue city mayors are doing everything they can to obstruct the Trump administration’s efforts to deport criminal illegal aliens,” she told The New York Post of the bill, a seeming reference to Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell publicly sharing information last month on the identities of Homeland Security conducting operations in his city.
Blackburn’s Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act would punish those who name officers “with the intent to obstruct a criminal investigation or immigration enforcement operation” with up to five years in prison.
The second Trump term is not the first to time masked immigration agents have been active, but masked officers have featured prominently in some of this administration’s most controversial moments, including the April arrest of Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, the May shoving match between Democrats and ICE agents at a New Jersey detention center, and ICE arrests at court houses and immigration offices around the country.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association has warned that such arrests at sensitive locations by masked agents will prevent people from accessing their legal rights and reduce government oversight.
“These actions will have a chilling effect if people are too terrified of attending court hearings with the knowledge ICE officers may be waiting to detain them at any given moment,” the group wrote in a memo last week. “This fear tactic robs noncitizen respondents of accessing a fair hearing process.”
