When The Law Won't Show Its Face

There can be no true public safety for any of us without public trust.

Lee en español: Cuando la ley no muestra su rostro

Imagine you’re walking down a street. On the sidewalk in front of you is a young woman walking alone. Unmarked cars suddenly pull up and armed, masked men grab her as she cries out her objections and force her into a vehicle. You and other bystanders are concerned and try to help, but to no avail. It looks like kidnapping or human trafficking or the start of a sexual assault.

This scenario isn’t imaginary.

From Los Angeles to New York to Atlanta to Minneapolis, masked ICE agents with their faces covered have been conducting raids and arrests. They wear plain clothes, show no ID or agency insignia, and drive unmarked vehicles. They've been doing this in courthouses, in front of chain home-improvement stores, and outside schools, among other locations.

The Department of Homeland Security authorizes this practice. Until the introduction in late June of the No Secret Police Act (HR 4176), which would largely ban it, no federal law had explicitly addressed it. Unless and until Congress acts, this practice will continue to be both terrifying and dangerous.

Take the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University outside Boston, who was arrested by masked individuals on March 25 of this year. The video is chilling. A man wearing all-black street clothes with a ball cap tucked under his hoodie walks towards her and corners her on the street. He’s head-and-shoulders taller than she is and he blocks her attempt to walk away. He isn’t wearing any ICE insignia or displaying any identification, so there’s nothing to distinguish him from a purse-snatcher, a mugger, or a kidnapper. Ms. Öztürk is crying audibly in the video as the man grabs her wrist and is joined by other masked individuals. At some point, they say, “We’re the police.” 

“Well, you don’t look like it,” says an onlooker. “Why are you hiding your faces?”

Not only was Ms. Öztürk detained, she was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana — 1,500 miles away. Only after a federal judge intervened to halt her deportation was she released.

Worse, because ICE agents are masking their faces and refusing to clearly identify themselves, cases of people illegally impersonating ICE agents are on the rise. In South Carolina, a man impersonating an ICE officer illegally detained a group of Latino men in their car, saying, “You from Mexico? You’re going back!” 

In Texas, a man was robbed by a person who claimed to be with ICE. In North Dakota, a man posing as an ICE agent walked an inmate out of county jail. 

In North Carolina, a man impersonating an ICE officer threatened a woman with deportation if she did not comply with his sexual assault on her.

When ICE agents refuse to show their faces and identify themselves — put another way, when no one has any way of distinguishing ICE agents from criminals — they set the standard that anyone, including criminals, can claim to be law enforcement.

And because mask-wearing is not prohibited in federal law or ICE policy — just by common decency and general morality — people all over America must face the prospect that a plain-clothed, masked person who refuses to identify themselves and could be impersonating law enforcement can drag you into an unmarked van, or worse.

In addition to being terrifying, it is dangerous — for everyone. We in Minnesota know something recent and tragic about this.

At 2:00 a.m. on June 14, a man wearing a silicone mask and impersonating law enforcement demanded entry to the home of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman, his wife Yvette, and their daughter Hope. They believed him and opened the door, then immediately realized he was there to do them harm. The masked man shot and seriously wounded Senator Hoffman and his wife. At 3:30 a.m., he did the same at the home of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita and her husband, Mark: he assassinated them both and mortally wounded their dog, Gilbert. Between those two murderous acts, the impersonator knocked on the door of two other state legislators who weren’t home. He would have assaulted or assassinated them as well if they had been home, and likely more legislators as well if he hadn’t been caught.

In American history, the good guys aren’t the ones who cover their faces: until now, they’ve been robbers, murderers, political assassins, and the Ku Klux Klan.

But in Trump 2.0, when masked, armed people pull unsuspecting folks off the street and toss them into unmarked vans, how can you tell a legitimate law enforcement action from an unprovoked assault? When you have no way to know who’s trying to detain you or why, how can you tell someone who’s supposed to protect you from someone who’s trying to harm or terrorize you?

The basic practice that law enforcement officers should identify themselves and show their faces is central to the concept of procedural justice. Procedural justice in policing is the simple idea that when people are treated fairly and equitably — when officers clearly identify themselves, when they approach people professionally and address them with respect, when they explain what they’re doing and why — people are more likely to cooperate and support the outcome of that enforcement action, regardless of what it is. Study after study after study has shown that people’s understanding not only of what decisions are, but how those decisions are made, has a positive impact on whether they trust the system and feel it is just. And public trust is essential to public safety: there is no real safety without trust.

The ICE policy that lets officers mask their faces and hide their identity erodes public trust — and less trust means less safety for everyone. It means that communities are less likely to comply with immigration enforcement. It means that immigrants, whether documented or not, are less likely to cooperate with legitimate enforcement of the law, like investigations of violent crime. It means that anyone from any community can worry that the next time a law enforcement officer approaches them, it could be an impersonator with bad intentions.

Accountability is also essential to public trust, but masks make it nearly impossible to identify individuals and hold them accountable for potential misconduct or abuses of power.

Ultimately, this ICE policy delegitimizes all law enforcement. It even puts officers themselves at risk.

I pray we do not see the day that a plain-clothed ICE agent wearing a mask and driving an unmarked car while on the job attempts to detain someone who may be legally armed, and that person chooses to defend themselves from what looks to them in a split second like an attempt to assault or kidnap them. I fear someone — the agent, the target of the arrest, or innocent bystanders — will be hurt or killed.

Former law enforcement officials agree. Former senior ICE official Mike Shuchart fears we are “setting ourselves up for a kind of vigilante problem where people either don’t know, or at least aren’t sure, that these officers who are dressed up like bank robbers are actually law enforcement officers.” Former FBI agent Mike German calls the practice “a public safety threat, and it’s also a threat to the agents and officers themselves, because people will not immediately be able to distinguish between who is engaged in legitimate activity or illegitimate activity when violence is occurring in public.”

When Minnesota law enforcement officers finally found and arrested the assassin of Melissa and Mark Hortman — who had already killed two people and severely injured two others, was highly dangerous and highly armed, and had already described his own murderous actions as “war” — they were unmasked. Why then do ICE agents who are pulling unarmed people off the street unawares need to mask themselves? Answer: they do not.

The claim that ICE agents need to mask themselves to protect themselves from doxing is a flimsy pretense. Any public servant and any American can be doxed, and there are well-known, common-sense things we can all do to make it less likely. ICE uses the excuse of its masked agents potentially being doxed to make it nearly impossible to hold them accountable if they abuse their power.

President Donald Trump or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could change this harmful practice with a stroke of a pen. Congress should quickly pass the No Secret Police Act to ban it. None of them will — unless we speak up. And by “we,” I mean not just people in immigrant communities, but every one of us, every American who values our safety and our freedom.

There can be no true public safety for any of us without public trust. But it’s hard to trust the law when the law won’t show its face.