Does America Have Secret Police Now?

[justaprogressive]

In It Was Only an Accident, the first movie from Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi after his 2022 arrest for making anti-state propaganda, a small-town mechanic suspects that the stranger who stops by his garage late one night is the same man who tortured him while he was in prison. The mechanic vows to take revenge, but there’s a problem: He never saw the man’s face, and all he has to go on is the telltale squeak of his tormenter’s prosthetic leg. Unable to stifle the nagging feeling that he might have the wrong man, the mechanic tracks down more and more victims, each of whom tries to identify their torturer in their own way, by the scars on his thigh, or his familiar smell. After a while, what started out as an anguished vigilante mission starts to feel more like a lopsided farce. Without the ability to identify the person who wronged them, the very idea of justice becomes a joke.

I thought of Panahi’s movie today, as I watched the video of federal agents handcuffing New York City comptroller Brad Lander inside an immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan after he demanded to see a judicial warrant for the migrant man they were attempting to arrest. Lander, who is also running for mayor in New York’s Democratic primary, is a familiar face around the courthouse. The agents knew exactly who they were taking into custody: Minutes beforehand, a reporter heard one asking another, “Do you want to arrest the comptroller?” But who those agents were, or even who they worked for, is more difficult to pin down. Because, in what has become a familiar—and, if you spend enough time on the internet, practically daily—sight, they were hiding their faces behind masks. Even as the New York Times’ story on the situation carried the headline that Lander had been “arrested by ICE,” in the body of the article, the reporter hedged his bets, identifying them only as “several men who appear to be law enforcement officers.”

“Men who appear to be law enforcement officers” is a broad category, and one we have already had chilling familiarity with this week. The suspect in the murders of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, was able to acquire enough gear to convincingly impersonate a police officer, at least for long enough to get his victims and actual police officers to let their guards down. On Tuesday in New York, one of the men who took Lander into custody was dressed in a backwards baseball cap and faded jeans, a guy you wouldn’t think twice about passing on the street, except guys who fit that description rarely go around wearing surgical masks over their salt-and-pepper beards these days. By law, federal agents are allowed to cover their faces, in order to protect themselves from retaliation by drug cartels and the like. But masked ICE agents seem to have become the rule rather than the exception. Scroll through the bystander videos of ICE raids on any social media platform or news publication, and you’ll struggle to find a single identifiable face. It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly when the practice became widespread, especially since the volume of ICE raids has increased so dramatically so recently (and has received corresponding increased attention). But go back even a year, and it’s relatively easy to find coverage of ICE raids in which the agents’ faces are clearly visible.

Trump administration officials frame widespread masking, when they bother to justify it at all, as a response to an epidemic of retaliation. “Federal agents and their children are being threatened, doxed and assaulted,” said U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts U.S. Leah Foley, who was appointed on Trump’s first day in office, in a post on social media. “That is why they must hide their faces.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/masked-law-enforcement-ice-cops-police.html

[atreides1]

1. Look at that

Tokens!

I've noticed that there seem to be a lot of non-white ICE agents in the field...slaves have to have masters!!!

[SamKnause]

2. Yes. Next question.