When ICE agents seized Rümeysa Öztürk off the street, there was a national outcry for several reasons. She had been targeted for detention simply for writing an op-ed for her school paper about the Palestinians in Gaza, a clear violation of her First Amendment rights. The group of six agents who seized her were dressed as civilians, so there was no way in the moment to tell whether the operation was sanctioned or legitimate.

Most disturbingly, those who detained her hid their identities behind masks. As CNN reported,

Surveillance video from Öztürk’s detention appears to show the six plainclothes officers casually approaching her and, shortly afterward, the officers all pull cloth coverings over their mouths and noses, some of them wearing sunglasses, as one of them restrains the student’s hands behind her back.

And as NPR noted,

The person taking one of the videos can be heard shouting to them, “You want to take those masks off? Is this a kidnapping? Can I see some faces here? How do I know this is the police?”

In a democracy, we value transparency. It’s a cornerstone of due process. Officials acting as officials, in nearly all circumstances, need to identify themselves as such by, for example, showing a badge. But they also need to be accountable for what happens next.

Jurisdictions around the country have passed body cam laws in order to increase such transparency and help ensure law enforcement will answer for any abuses. It’s an imperfect system, to be sure, but it has allowed the public to see for itself what is happening, rather than rely upon the word of the arresting officers.

Yet ICE agents today routinely conduct raids with their faces hidden, as if they are some kind of secret police. This produces considerable confusion and a high likelihood of confrontation, including from bystanders, at the moment the agents announce themselves. Further, it instills fear in the general populace because no one ever knows who in a crowd might be agents waiting to pull up their scarves and start detaining people.

That atmosphere of trepidation and uncertainty is part of the point. But in a free society, we shouldn’t tolerate this. We must be able to discern the identities of the people purporting to be agents of our federal government and hold them to account with the same tools and rules we apply to local law enforcement. No sheriff in the U.S. would be allowed to operate with a mask or a hood on. Our history is replete with horrors from when that practice has been allowed to stand.

The Department of Homeland Security has its stated reasons for why its agents are donning face coverings. Let’s start there and punch some holes in why it’s still wholly unacceptable. Then we’ll walk through some of the real reasons—from the cowardly to the terrifying—that they are hiding their faces.

“Standard Practice”

Walter Olson of the CATO Institute reviewed several documented and publicized arrests made by ICE agents around the country. He concluded,

A casual search reveals that ICE agents have worn face coverings, ski masks, and the like in raids and stops reported from around the country (Westminster, MD; Douglas County, CO; Great Barrington, MA; Bellingham, WA).

He noted that they also wore masks when abducting Öztürk (who was finally freed by a judge earlier this month), and concluded that, with respect to hiding the identities of its agents, the “Trump Department of Homeland Security appears to have made it standard practice.”

The administration well understands that the wearing of masks can allow individuals to break the law and act with impunity. In fact, it has used this as justification to place demands on elite universities following student protests on campus. As Olson notes, these demands have included new policies banning facial coverings.

In its letter to Harvard University, for example, the Trump administration wrote,

Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.

But if Harvard must do so in the name of transparency, why not Homeland Security?

Let’s be clear: We aren’t just talking about ICE agents wearing plain clothes to blend in. As John Miller, CNN’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, noted,

[I]t is standard procedure for ICE officers and other agents from the Department of Homeland Security to wear plain clothes during field operations if they properly identify themselves as a law enforcement officer.

But the masking of agents’ identities raises a new and different question entirely. “[I]f they are legitimate law enforcement agents carrying out a proper arrest under the law, why are they hiding their identities?” Miller asked.

Asked by CNN why officers have opted to use masks when detaining students, a DHS spokesman said this:

“When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as police while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected terrorist sympathizers.”

In other words, they don‘t want to be doxxed.

Traditionally, agents have donned facial coverings only when the arrest is of some major kingpin or mob boss, where violent retaliation is a real danger. DHS has now taken that same logic and extended it to every official action, on the grounds that the “woke mob” will seek revenge.

That makes no sense and is a distortion of the actual risk to agents, all in furtherance of a dangerous blanket policy.

All other law enforcement must operate in the open

The claim that DHS agents get to act with anonymity at all times in their public interactions is a remarkable one. Other officers—from police, to prosecutors, to judges—operate routinely with their faces showing. They do so even though they are often the subject of doxxing and threats, even upon their lives and the safety and well-being of their families.

So why should Homeland Security get a pass?

Defenders of the practice point to the doxxing and threats upon police who allegedly used excessive force against protestors during the summer of 2020, when there were widespread civil protests against police brutality. As an initial matter, it is not necessarily a bad thing for officers who are acting outside the bounds of acceptable police action to be called out publicly for it. And in any event, the public shaming of a few officers hardly justifies the wholesale use of facial coverings today, allowing DHS officers to act with anonymity and impunity in all their interactions.

Imagine for a moment the outcry if federal prosecutors and judges began hiding their identities online and wearing masks in court. MAGA would claim immediately that we are in a police state, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

Opponents of facial masking argue that if you sign up to be an ICE or CBP agent, you should understand that part of the job is to act within legal and acceptable social boundaries. If you exceed those, you could and ought to be publicly identified and held to account.

They know they’re doing something wrong

Columnist EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic offered one explanation of the behavior of DHS agents in his state. These agents recently began conducting arrests outside of the courthouse where asylum seekers had been lured.

Montini gave the agents the benefit of the doubt and assumed, at least for the purposes of his piece, that they had signed up because they actually believe in law enforcement and want to protect America from “dangerous criminals” who enter the country illegally. They wanted to target “the worst of the worst,” just as Trump promised he’d do.

Only that’s not what has been happening.

The people arrested in Phoenix and held for deportation are not criminals. They were asylum seekers who had filled out the CBP One application and were at the courthouse for a regularly scheduled appointment.

But in a cynical and cruel twist, Department of Justice attorneys were there not to process but to dismiss their cases. As soon as that happened, they told DHS agents to arrest people as they left the building. It was a devious trick, a way to round up numerous people through deceit and a “gotcha” process. The Trump administration had changed the rules on the spot, and it expected agents to enforce the new ones.

These aren’t the “worst of the worst.” As Montini writes,

So, it becomes your job to handcuff people who have done exactly what they agreed to do under conditions set by the government. Some young. Some older. Some mothers with children.

You most likely have seen or read what the politicians who are not afraid of Donald Trump are saying about this.

So what’s an ICE agent to do? While what they are doing is “legal” because the rules have suddenly changed, it is far from moral. And people who do immoral things, even if technically legal, don’t want their identities known. Montini concludes,

If it was me, and my job was “busting people who followed the rules,”… I’d wear a mask, too.

Are these even real federal agents?

Montini’s view is at best charitable. The sort of folks who affirmatively want to become ICE and CBP agents, especially under the leadership of ghouls like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, are nowadays often not true patriots wishing to protect the country.

Far-right militia groups share one thing in common with the DHS agents who are fanning out to detain immigrants: They love to wear face coverings.

For example, over the Memorial Day weekend, the Kansas City Defender noted,

On Saturday more than a hundred masked white fascists snapped open the rear doors of a convoy of U-Haul trucks and spilled onto the steps of Kansas City’s World War I Memorial. Faces hidden by white masks, they unfurled inverted U.S. flags and Confederate banners and marched a tight downtown loop through the crossroads while chanting “Reclaim America.”

The reason fascist zealots don face coverings is so that they can continue to exist anonymously in civil society and not get “canceled” (for example, fired from their jobs or have their businesses boycotted) for their white nationalist hate.

It is unclear how many right-wing militia members have signed up to be DHS agents, but there is a commonality of purpose that must be very alluring to them. In such a job, they can terrorize migrant communities, play out their authoritarian fantasies, and continue to act with total anonymity and therefore unaccountability.

We already know that the ranks of local police forces often include disproportionately large percentages of militia members. Per reporting by PBS, after a membership list of the Oath Keepers leaked, the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism identified more than 370 people it believed worked in law enforcement, including chiefs of police and sheriffs. More than 100 were actively in the military.

Militias in border states such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas have been active for years, detaining migrants and calling in to the U.S. Border Patrol to file reports. And Trump’s open embrace of the Proud Boys and his pardoning of all of the January 6 defendants have sent an unmistakable message that he sees them as his partners rather than a threat to civil society.

The Texas Observer reported in February 2025 that an ICE prosecutor in Dallas named James Rodden—who was assistant chief counsel for ICE—actively operated a white supremacist account on the X platform under the name of GlomarResponder. It noted,

[F]irst created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”

This was hardly the first instance of a high level ICE official’s connection to right-wing hate and extremism. As the Nevada Current reported toward the end of Trump’s first term, citing a report by Vice,

[A] local captain at a U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement facility in Pahrump wrote numerous posts on a white supremacist Internet group. While calling facts reported by Vice disturbing, Michael Kagan, the director of UNLV’s immigration clinic, said the problem is much bigger than one person.

“This is not isolated, and that’s what makes (the article) so alarming,” Kagan said.

Though there have been stories in the past of racism behind immigration enforcement, Kagan noted more recent reporting has shown U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents writing racist and sexist posts on secret Facebook groups and ICE agents using slurs against immigrants.

Given the documented history of ICE’s connection to white supremacist extremism and private hate groups on social media, the notion that DHS will continue to allow face coverings and total anonymity of its agents should raise significant alarm. It is no less than an open invitation to these extremists to come join the ranks of the Department and carry out their personal racist agendas with the blessings and sanctions of the federal government.

Pushing back

Democratic officials are finally beginning to push back against the practice of facial coverings worn by DHS officers. And while this so far has merely taken the form of a sternly worded letter to the Department of Homeland Security (because legislation is unlikely to have bipartisan support), it is notable that two senators are raising the issue and now putting it front and center.

“Across the country and in Virginia, masked ICE officers and agents without clearly visible identification as law enforcement have been arresting individuals on the streets and in sensitive locations, such as courthouses. Such actions put everyone at risk—the targeted individuals, the ICE officers and agents, and bystanders who may misunderstand what is happening and may attempt to intervene,” wrote Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, both from Virginia.

They continued, “The failure of ICE officers and agents to promptly and clearly identify who they are and the authority under which they are acting has led witnesses of immigration enforcement operations to justifiably question the law enforcement status, authority, and constitutionality of ICE officers and agents and their operations. Such actions compromise the safety of law enforcement officers and agents conducting the operation, the individual(s) being apprehended, bystanders, and other law enforcement who may be called to the scene to respond to a suspected crime.”

The senators request that DHS, and ICE in particular, provide actual policies, guidance, and training that discuss when and how to use face coverings and how to reveal agent identities during enforcement operations.

While this isn’t likely on its own to produce any changes at the Department, the public can push back, too. During ICE actions, and at protests outside of ICE facilities where once again face coverings mask the identities of officers, onlookers and demonstrators can and should call out the anonymity of the officials as fascist and un-American. The media, too, should play a part here, highlighting the bizarre and unprecedented use of face coverings by officials—and its disturbing similarity to white supremacist group practices.

What we cannot allow is for this practice of anonymous, masked ICE agents to become normalized or accepted. That is a quick road to a very dark place, especially as the GOP-controlled Congress prepares to authorize billions in new spending for immigration enforcement, including huge bonuses for ICE agents.

We need to know who these people are and especially whether they have any ties to dangerous groups. The Trump administration likely knows the disturbing answer, and this may explain why it continues to support the hiding of their identities from the public.