ICE’s mask thing is fucked up.
Officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement should not be wearing masks when taking people off the street.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has boasted that President Donald Trump’s increasingly authoritarian regime has “proven to be the most transparent ever,” but this is self-evidently a lie. I think a genuinely transparent administration would not have its immigration officials concealing their identities before making arrests, unless we mean “transparently villainous.”
I was disturbed by the sight of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers taking Rumeysa Ozturk from the street. One month later, she is still in a detention facility in Louisiana, in conditions described as “punitive and unsanitary,” where prisoners have reportedly been “denied medical care, given insufficient feminine hygiene supplies or served rotten food.” Her “crime” was writing an op-ed critical of Israel published in the Tufts student newspaper.
When Ms. Ozturk was taken, a bystander asked: “Is this a kidnapping?”
An ICE agent responded: “We’re the police.”
Why was he hiding his face? Why did multiple police hide their faces?
More than one agent pulled up a covering, so one must assume this was coordinated—everybody en route to that mission had their mask packed. This synchronicity suggests premeditation and directive from higher up the chain of command—perhaps ICE Acting Director, Todd Lyons?—not a shared whim. Who in ICE leadership decided on this dark new policy of masking up before taking an enforcement action? What is this expected to accomplish? What motivated it? Did anyone object, and why were their objections ignored?
You can read her essay here, and decide whether someone ought to be jailed and deported for it. To be quite clear: an awful lot of people in Washington have written all sorts of letters to the editors of college magazines, and in this town it is considered to be below-the-belt to bring them up. I would suggest that even the edgiest student essay falls short of “activities in support of Hamas,” and hardly feels out of the bounds of First Amendment activity and civic debate.
I have previously made this comparison and want to reiterate it. The kidnapping of a woman by government agents has long been a staple of Hollywood as a cold open, to establish the setting as a dystopia. Both “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “V for Vendetta” open this way.
For some time, Republicans championed the cause of free speech on college campuses (a lie your boy Hex disproved when, in my twenties, I was asked to leave Liberty University’s academic quad by the Jerry Falwell Library for wearing a JESUS IS A CUNT t-shirt). Yet, other than Charlie Kirk, that set seems less interested in protecting discourse from forceful government reprisal than they were defending racist or transphobic speech from expressions of disapproval.
The masks are not unique to Ms. Ozturk’s example; we have seen them elsewhere. Adrian Baron, an immigration attorney in Connecticut, reported that while he was helping a Polish client—who had no criminal convictions—correct an expired tourist visa, his car was blocked by four black SUVs outside the courthouse, and his client was removed from the vehicle by ICE and ATF agents in tactical gear and ski masks. Nobody sensible would imagine this disproportionately martial response was necessary to resolve a paperwork violation the man was already in the process of fixing, so it is a fair assumption that the spectacle was the point. Or, to be more explicitly Orwellian: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
On April 22, 2025, two men were detained at the Albemarle County Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, by plainclothes ICE officers—one in a balaclava, carrying a North Face Recon backpack with a neon green knockoff Nalgene; another in a pink button-down and a man-bun, looking less like an agent of the state than someone eager to install a “large breast” mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The arrest resembled a kidnapping so closely that bystanders called the police. “Agent Manbun” threatened them, and now appears to be pursuing obstruction charges.”
How, precisely, is one meant to distinguish an ICE agent from an armed intruder, if the agent declines to identify as law enforcement? There are, in fact, documented cases of burglars impersonating ICE officers. When there is a knock and uniformed police are visible, I speak through the doorbell camera. If circumstances require it, I step outside and lock the door behind me. When it is an FBI agent with a visible lanyard, I request identification and confirm their credentials. If someone in a ski mask is standing on the other side of the peephole, I take cover behind furniture with a baseball bat. I have never played the sport, and I have for a decade or more been privately boycotting the Washington Nationals.
Clayton Jackson, an attorney from Dallas, said that he was visited by ICE to intimidate him from helping an immigrant family find pro bono representation. The agents first disabled his Wi-Fi so his Ring camera could not identify them, then declined to give their names or badge numbers when asked. Why? Who told them they had the right to be anonymous and unaccountable? Fidelity National Financial, Inc., an insurance company chaired by major Republican donor William Foley II, fired Mr. Jackson shortly after he spoke out, though they claimed the reasons were unrelated.
Surveillance footage from Denver has also shown ICE agents trying to blind doorbell cameras, this time with tape. Civil rights attorney Jason Kosloski said after reviewing the footage: “This isn’t a tactical situation. They’re just knocking on doors. So why are they making sure nobody can see what they’re doing?”
To be clear: what they are doing is not always “catching the bad guys,” no matter how much they want to “Lyonize” themselves. (My apologies. I have been waiting for some time to make this pun about Mr. Lyons.) Sometimes, they knock on the wrong door and ruin the wrong lives. In Oklahoma City, a woman and her daughters were ripped from their beds by ICE, the FBI, and U.S. Marshals—all of them U.S. citizens, none of them named in the warrant. They were made to stand outside in their underwear while agents ransacked their home and seized their belongings, including their phones, laptops, and life savings. Again, the agents declined to identify themselves. No contact info was left behind. Law enforcement confirmed afterwards: “it was a little rough this morning.”
It is not unprecedented globally that armed men might wear ski masks, but this image is more typically associated with terrorist militias, bank robbers, and Mortal Kombat characters—not law enforcement. Andy Griffith would never.
The ICE Facebook page is full of cryptic warnings and an odd hashtag campaign advising the public to refrain from interfering with apprehensions—suggesting a fear the public might start fighting them off. An interesting idea; oftentimes, Republicans try in advance to stigmatize techniques they know will be effective against them. The public should continue to film and document whatever the hell it is ICE is doing.
I think this government does want some conflict between civilians and ICE. The why escapes me, but what makes the most sense—in a circular way—is that if someone in the public can get themselves recorded threatening ICE agents, opening fire during a no-knock raid, or perhaps trying to wrestle their child away from immigration agents, the resulting kerfuffle will provide retroactive, ex post facto justification or rationale for the gangsterification of ICE.
Mr. Trump’s April 2025 executive order, “STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS,” (all caps in the original) provides legal indemnity for federal law enforcement, instructing the DOJ to remove “impediments” like consent decrees with police departments notorious for civil rights abuses, promising military hardware to domestic police, providing pro bono legal defense for police accused of brutality, and prosecution of oversight, supervisory, or legislative bodies that try to curb misconduct—in other words, unlimited indulgences for cops who want to hurt people.
There has been a threat hanging in the air, too, that habeas corpus will be suspended. Oh boy.
This was also the plot of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+. Kingpin Wilson Fisk rises to power as New York City’s mayor—hard to tell these days if this would be an upgrade or downgrade from Eric Adams—and secures influence over law enforcement by stacking the NYPD with guys with Punisher tattoos and explicitly revoking oversight. Brutal chud cops act without consequences, and attempts to expose or restrain this machinery (including by city officials, journalists, or even superheroes) are met with intimidation, legal retaliation, and targeted violence.
On HBO’s Watchmen sequel, wherein all of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s police wear superhero costumes, the Silk Specter muses: “What’s the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante? I don’t know either.” The vigilante thing is a key motivator to all this. I know there are practical reasons these thugs and gangsters disguise themselves—avoiding accountability or notoriety for the harms they are causing, mainly. I suspect part of the calculus is to shield Mr. Trump’s stormtroopers from trial at the Hague. They claim they want to protect themselves and their families from retribution, which would be sympathetic if one forgot that beat cops come into contact with plenty of villains in their local communities. Yet, they are unafraid to wear their name badges openly.
It is not as obvious as it would be if they dressed like Spider-Man or Batman. Still, I think many of these people do fantasize about themselves as heroes who operate outside the law, which is problematic when their role is to enforce the law. Full stop: This practice must end.
Just in recent days, a mayor and a judge have been arrested, sitting congresspeople have been threatened with the same. Celebrity Twitch streamer Hasan Piker was detained and interrogated at the border. All newspaper editorialists, talking heads, Democratic politicians, celebrity activists, videogame streamers—anyone with a platform—should recognize this threat may come for them, too, and denounce this practice at least once a week.