Letting ICE agents wear masks could create bigger safety issues, critics warn

The Trump administration says hiding immigration agents’ identities, including by wearing masks, keeps them safe. But critics say it’s a recipe for confusion that escalates the risk of injury for officers and the public. Armed, plainclothes agents with covered faces are taking on a bigger role in the Trump administration’s efforts to meet a 3,000-a-day immigration arrest quota. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carried out arrests in blue jeans and T-shirts at a New York courthouse. And police in Pasadena believe that a man who hopped out of an unmarked vehicle and pointed a gun at pedestrians last month is an ICE officer, but said they had no way of confirming that. Democrats and public safety experts say that ambiguity leaves observers of arrests and raids guessing whether what they’re watching play out is a law enforcement operation or something else entirely, which puts personnel in danger. “Let’s think about an area like Philadelphia or Texas, where the average gun ownership rate is maybe higher than the rest of the country, and the unidentifiable masked man wants to snatch somebody off the street, and someone wants to intervene because they think it’s an illegal act happening,” Hans Menos, a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity, a public safety policy research and advocacy center, told NOTUS. “Pretending that can’t happen is really naive.” Menos said that it’s not only dangerous for the bystanders, but for the agents themselves. He added the practice reminded him of “several cases” where alarmed bystanders shot at plainclothes officers when he directed the Philadelphia Police Department’s advisory committee. As videos of raids turning disruptive and violent circulate online, ICE has justified its officers’ use of masks by saying they’re needed to prevent them from becoming targets of assault and doxing. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security have rejected claims that ICE or its Enforcement and Removal Operations officers don’t identify themselves. “Our officers verbally identify themselves, wear vests that say ICE/ERO or Homeland Security, and are flanked by vehicles that also say the name of the department,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement to NOTUS. A coalition of 21 Democratic state attorneys general insists otherwise. In a letter to Congress sent Tuesday morning, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 20 counterparts urged lawmakers to pass legislation to stop ICE’s “now-routine practice of carrying out arrests in public spaces through masked agents who do not identify themselves as law enforcement,” arguing that the “tactics pose significant public safety risks.” Some Democrats in Congress have taken steps to address the issue, though their legislative proposals are long-shot solutions. They argue that mandating standardized uniform and identification policies for immigration enforcement officers would make them safer while on the job, as well as make raids less disruptive to communities or less distressing to observers. “We’ve seen an alarming trend of ICE agents engaging with the public while concealing their law enforcement affiliation. This not only puts our communities at risk, but also the safety of the officers themselves,” Rep. Grace Meng of New York, who introduced a bill that would require agents to display badges, said in a statement to NOTUS. “Just look at the increase in reports of people impersonating ICE agents and creating even more chaos in communities.” People have been arrested and charged with impersonating immigration agents across the U.S. for months. And DHS’s critics have argued that a lack of consistent uniform standards makes that too easy for bad-faith actors to do. An aide for Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who introduced legislation that would require agents to wear badges as well as bar them from wearing nonmedical face coverings, told NOTUS in a written statement that DHS’s insistence that its agents are always identifiable is “simply not true.” The aide added that Padilla’s legislation would allow officers to wear “badge numbers instead of names to balance officer safety with transparency for our communities.” A spokesperson for New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a co-sponsor, said the bill would prevent people from impersonating immigration enforcement agents as well as provide clarity to observers during raids. “We are hearing reports of people impersonating officers, or people thinking they were being robbed or kidnapped by unidentifiable criminals,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to NOTUS. “If DHS’s claims that immigration enforcement agents always identify themselves are true, they should have no objections to this bill, which would only codify law enforcement best practices into federal law, keeping our communities and our law enforcement officers safe.” President Donald Trump pushed back hard on Padilla and Booker’s proposal last week, saying that its supporters “hate our country” and that the rhetoric from Democratic officials about ICE is fueling increased violence against agents. Congress just passed $30 billion in additional funding for ICE to bolster its immigration enforcement operations. Republican lawmakers on the Hill have echoed the administration’s concerns about agents being targeted. When a journalist asked Sen. Eric Schmitt last week about the optics of how ICE performs these raids, he balked at the question. “The concern is that there’s too many radicals out there who want to dox these people and go after their families. You’ve seen assaults on ICE officials now go up 700% just the last few weeks, and so I think they need our protection,” Schmitt said. He added that given the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., “asking questions about ICE agents doing their jobs is a little backwards.” Schmitt’s office told NOTUS in a statement that he’s proposing a bill to double the maximum penalty for assaulting immigration agents. In a statement about the threat to immigration agents, Schmitt placed the blame on Democrats and accused them of running “an around-the-clock hate campaign” against them. That 700% figure that Schmitt pointed to is one that DHS counterparts have repeated often, and that supporters are rallying behind. DHS didn’t respond to a request from NOTUS for the underlying data backing up that claim. A Fox News journalist posted on X that DHS shared that the number of assaults against ICE agents from the same five-month period increased from 10 assaults last year to 79 this year. Accounting for that increase, that’s a small number relative to, for example, the New York Police Department, whose officers are required by law to identify themselves when asked and which reported that its uniformed officers faced 970 assaults in the first five months of 2025. Safety threats and doxing are not novel threats for anyone who works in the criminal justice system, argued Diane Goldstein, a 21-year police veteran from California who now leads the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a nonprofit coalition of former criminal justice officials that promotes police-community relations policies. From beat cops to judges, she said, it’s a pervasive problem that could be, and has been, addressed through other means, such as policies providing personal data deletion services to those at risk. But she said anonymizing law enforcement is far from a safe or serious solution. “No one knows: Are these people legitimately conducting an operation? Are they really ICE agents or CBP agents? And why is there not a supervisor that’s attached to every single one of these deployments, whose responsibility is ensuring that the public knows that they are a legitimate branch of the government?” Goldstein said. “It’s unprofessional, and it undermines the entirety of law enforcement legitimacy, whether it’s local, state or federal.” This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS — a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute — and NEWSWELL, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.