Masked & Armed, Trump's ICE-Men Accept No Limits
No warrants. No accountability. Just brute force turned on immigrants of color, and anyone who helps them, with little care for due process, immigration status, or lack of a violent criminal record.
They’re masked, never explicitly identified, and you often see them dressed in simple jeans and sweatshirts. How do you know if the group invading your workplace with serious-looking guns in hand are government agents, or if they’re renegade vigilantes playing dress-up to make a point and get their jollies?
You don’t, I guess.
Masks have long been used by secret police the world over to get away with horrible acts of violence against people. City and community police generally don’t seem to need masks, and in many areas across the country, police are required to wear cameras to track their actions and the methods they use. That protects the civil rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, even if the person being addressed is, indeed, a criminal.
Let’s be fair: SWAT teams wear masks in rare, high-risk raids on gang safe houses or drug rings to protect against retaliation. But scooping up people on their way to a shift at Home Depot or a meatpacking plant, or grabbing folks in courthouse hallways? That’s not really the same thing, is it?
The actions taken by ICE agents have ignited a politically charged debate over whether their use of masks is to protect their safety or whether it’s simply covering up their identities to allow them to engage in aggressively rough intimidation tactics against both the people they pick up, and anyone who has the nerve to challenge their actions, without consequence or accountability.
History teaches us that when government agents start covering their faces, it’s rarely a sign of democratic health. Where are masks worn in actions taken in support of a government, or —heaven help us — a supreme leader? How about Iran, the villain of choice for Trump’s latest round of see-how-tough-I-am talk.
Iran’s Basij Militias wear motorbike helmets and face coverings in suppressing dissent to the will of Iran’s theocratic government, sometimes at a level that seems largely insignificant.
In 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was arrested by Iran’s morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. She died in custody after reportedly being beaten into a coma. A wave of protests followed, led largely by women and students demanding freedom from state control. It was put down by masked and heavily armed Basij members who swarmed city streets, stormed university campuses, and hunted down dissenters.
Their tactics: beatings, live gunfire, and mass arrests, often carried out without warning or identification.
According to a 2023 UN fact-finding mission, these forces—led by the Basij—blinded more than 120 protesters, deliberately shooting them in the eyes with metal pellets and rubber bullets, and at least 500 were killed. Students and professors at prominent universities were rounded up, with some dragged away with black bags over their heads. The Basij didn’t just enforce state control; they became its violent face, silencing a generation that dared to speak the words “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Ku Klux Klan
Scary, huh? But let’s take a little trip back into U.S. history, when the Ku Klux Klan, masked and anonymous, terrorized Black Americans with the blessing, or silent approval, of local lawmen, judges, and politicians.
And now, masked ICE agents resembling paramilitary forces are certainly contributing to the growing atmosphere of impunity and state overreach that’s spurred protests by millions of Americans nationwide. And their targets are somewhat similar to the Klan’s: people with black or brown skin.
The images of masked men dragging people from homes or workplaces, slamming aside and handcuffing anyone who even asks them to show legal viability, does tend to evoke secret police tactics rather than legitimate enforcement action.
ICE’s public affairs offices have at times declined to comment or cited "ongoing investigations" when asked to explain the use of masks in specific incidents. ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, provided a public defense after a May 30 raid in San Diego at an Italian restaurant.
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks,” Lyons said. “But I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, their family on the line, because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is.”
When California lawmakers proposed banning masked federal officers, DHS responded vigorously, and DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “These disgusting smears … have led to a more than 400 percent increase in assaults on ICE officers.”
Nerdy Brad Lander?
You have to wonder what this particular Trump apparatchik means in her use of the word assaults. Did Brad Lander, the New York City Comptroller and current mayoral candidate, actually assault an agent when he was roughly slammed by four ICE officers into a wall and handcuffed in a courthouse hallway?
Did you see the media coverage of this? I did.
Lander’s a white, 55-year-old guy with glasses, a button-down shirt, and the unmistakable build of someone who spends more time reading policy briefs than working out. I’d call him nerdy, certainly not someone who needs four well-built young men to wrestle him down. He merely held on tightly to the immigrant he was accompanying to court and pulled back when agents grabbed his arm in the rush to separate them.
Assault? It’s probably a good thing for Trump’s Justice Department that they didn’t bring charges against Lander. Heck, I’d pay to watch that trial, and the million-dollar false arrest case he slaps them with before the ink on the verdict is dry. Imagine what might come up in discovery during that case. Remember, Lander is the son of an attorney.
Meanwhile, I’d love to see a list of the assaults cited by McLaughlin. How about you? But like everything involving the Trump administration, we won’t see it, and if we do, it’ll be chock-full of errors, as we’ve seen from the reports filed by his DOGE group and his health agencies.
The accurate use of numbers isn’t exactly a strong suit for this president or this administration. Outright lies? Yeah, that happens.
If defending someone’s basic civil rights now qualifies as “assault,” then it’s not just immigrants under threat, it’s anyone who dares to stand up to Trump’s shock troops and questions the legitimacy — or the brute-force tactics — that’s now passed off as law enforcement.
Come on, folks, think this through. If this is allowed, what’s the next step here? How slippery is this slope under a guy like Trump, particularly if he makes it through the mid-term elections with the U.S. Congress tightly in his grasp? Do you think the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court will be any sort of protection against him at that point?
DOGE, ICE, and the Proud Boys
Trump’s already using his presidential powers to attack universities financially, seeking to remove or censure professors whose views conflict with the far-right ideology of his far-right enablers, restrict student protest, reshape history lessons, and control the direction of federally funded research.
Is he biding his time until the use of ICE runs its course, and he sees the need for groups like Vladimir Putin’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB’s internal security arm? Without any authorization from Congress, he’s already created DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, as an unaccountable agency set up to gut the civil service, strip power from career experts, and clear the path for billionaire-friendly deregulation.
Can an FSB-type agency, designed to spy on enemies and purge dissent, be that far behind?
What happens if the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, his paramilitary groups of choice, suddenly start attacking people who dissent, like the Basij of Iran? Will a Trump administration take action to find and arrest them? We’re already seeing physical attacks on political opponents to Trump coming more regularly as a result of his ongoing campaign to frame dissent as treason and paint his opponents as enemies of America itself.
What makes us think his Proud Boy foot soldiers would face any consequences at all should he be able to solidify his control of Congress in the mid-terms? Scary, huh?