In ICE masking debate, these former officers say take them off

Former law enforcement and immigration officials are coming out in opposition to the Trump administration’s defense of masks worn by agents leading its immigration crackdown. 

The federal government has argued that having officers wear masks is necessary for their protection, but former officials who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations told The Hill it’s important for law enforcement to show their faces. 

“We have never worn masks my entire career,” said Darius Reeves, whose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) career spanned the Bush, Obama, Biden and both Trump administrations.

Reeves said the masking appeared to start when other federal forces were augmented into ICE and needed to maintain anonymity for potential undercover operations in their day-to-day job. 

But that “no longer seems to be the scenario,” he said, adding that current immigration tactics are “something totally weird, something I totally do not recognize.”

The issue of masked officers has grown in prominence since the January killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Good was killed by a masked ICE officer, while Pretti was shot to death by masked Border Patrol agents. 

Democrats have long criticized the masks and have made unmasking agents a key part of the talks around funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been partially shut down since mid-February.

The Trump administration and many Republicans on Capitol Hill have cited an uptick in attacks against federal officers in pushing back against Democratic demands. 

“They are facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them, a 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks against them, and an 8,000% increase in death threats against them,” DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement. “Publicizing their identities puts their lives and the lives of their families at serious risk.”

Noel March, a former U.S. Marshal for the District of Maine under President Obama, said there are other ways to balance safety of immigration agents with the need for accountability.  

“In the 40 years that I served behind a badge, my face was visible to every member of the public and my family name, I wore on the front of my uniform,” March said. 

“When law enforcement becomes anonymous to the very people they have sworn to serve, then we have gone into a very dark place of mistrust of our country,” he said.

ICE uproar fuels outrage over masking 

In response to the citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, Democrats have proposed several reforms, including a masking ban as well as identification and body camera requirements, in an effort to boost accountability. These proposals have been largely rejected by the White House and House GOP leadership, leaving talks to fund DHS at a standstill. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) at a press conference in February said these demands were “lines in the sand” for Democrats, who are under increasing pressure to restart DHS funding amid the war with Iran, given potential threats to the homeland.  

The possibility of doxing is often used as a reason to hide the identities of federal immigration officers, and John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, said there’s no clear answer to the masking question, given the difficulty of balancing the safety of agents with accountability for their actions. 

He blamed the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics in places like Minneapolis for fueling anger toward federal immigration agents. But he said there also needs to be policies that offer protection for agents carrying out their job. 

“So I think what I’d like to see at least, is some effort to build a policy that makes its overarching goal, of course, is the protection and the safety of the officers and agents, but also seeks to minimize the usage of masks,” he said. 

Other former law enforcement officials who spoke to The Hill echoed Sandweg, arguing there are better ways to increase protection and minimize possible doxing.

“There are people who will purposefully go out there and use the information to attempt to intimidate law enforcement from doing their job, or for nothing else, more than to embarrass them,” former New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Kenneth Quick said, noting that he would back more legal protections for officers, but any law should “also inspire the full transparency” to “promote legitimacy.”

Brandon del Pozo, another former NYPD officer who was also chief of police in Burlington, Vt., said anyone who threatens or harasses a federal immigration officer should be prosecuted and arrested. But he emphasized that law enforcement officials wearing masks “is not the answer.”

“When we see ICE wearing masks every day, all the time out in public no matter who you’re dealing with, that’s just unprecedented and wrong,” Pozo told The Hill, stating local police officers regularly face possible doxing and do not wear masks in their daily work. 

Jim Bueermann, a former police chief of the Redlands Police Department in California and founder of the Future Policing Institute, a research group, encouraged federal immigration officers to take preventative measures against doxing, such as maintaining private social media accounts, using cybersecurity strategies and scrubbing personal information from the internet. 

He noted that the rationale behind doxing is “frequently connected to the public perception that the behavior of either the police or the federal agents is completely illegitimate and inappropriate.”

Trust in ICE declines

The debate over law enforcement’s masking spotlights larger questions about Americans’ declining trust in federal immigration officials. 

Nearly 60 percent of Americans believe that the Trump administration has gone too far in its efforts to deport migrants living illegally in the country. Sixty-two percent of poll respondents, meanwhile, said they opposed ICE’s use of force in these operations. And 63 percent of people said they opposed officers’ masking during enforcement activities, per NBC News. 

Sandweg said federal immigration operations need to return to traditional targeted operations, with a prioritization of targeting people with a clear criminal record. 

“If you really focus on that, I think you’ll find that the need to wear masks dissipates,” Sandweg said.

“I’m not just talking about people who maybe were detained because they were driving without a license but have no other criminal history,” he added. “You can’t just say those are dangerous people.”

In January, a YouGov poll pointed to declining confidence in federal immigration officials among GOP voters too. 

Quick, meanwhile, questioned whether masking sends the message that officers have something to hide.

“People would ask for your name and badge number,” Quick said, referencing his 25 years of service with the NYPD. “I would always freely give it because I knew that I was well within the bounds of the law, that I was doing my job properly, so the feeling was that I have nothing to hide.” 

“The mask goes against that,’” Quick added. “The mask alludes to, ‘We are this police entity going out and we don’t want you to know who we are because we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing.’”

Some states, led by Democratic mayors and governors, have sought to ban masking among law enforcement officials. 

This year, in California, the No Secret Police Act, went into effect. But in February, a federal judge ruled that the state cannot ban federal agents from wearing masks during operations. 

And last summer, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order that stated “law enforcement cannot wear any mask, covering, or disguise intended to conceal their identities from the public while performing their official duties” in the city.

Bueermann said the federal status quo just doesn’t align with American values. 

“This is not going to work for people,” he said. “We’re a democracy where the people who are paid to enforce laws and keep us safe are accountable to the public at the end of the day.” 

“There’s a public accountability issue here and it’s very difficult to do that when nobody can identify anybody,” he continued. 

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