ICE's Masks Are All a Lie

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This week, Congress is debating what reform might be acceptable for the masked fascist secret police currently occupying major American cities in Democratic-run states — a supposedly civilian law enforcement agency that, in any other country, US journalists wouldn’t hesitate to label breezily “a right-wing paramilitary militia loyal to the regime that is staging a terror campaign against separatist regions led by key figures of the political opposition.”

Today, the leaders of ICE and CBP will be front and center on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee. First and foremost on the Democrats’ list of reform demands is that ICE and CBP remove the masks that have been ubiquitous in their immigration enforcement and day-to-day operations since Donald Trump took office last year.

To hear the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over the possibility that ICE officers and CBP agents might be prohibited from wearing masks by congressional reforms is to imagine that these agents work in some impossibly hostile environment where the slightest glimpses of their faces might lead to danger for everyone they’ve ever known. In absurd media interviews, like this one on CNBC yesterday, Republican officials are making it seem like working immigration in the US is as dangerous as being an honest narcotics investigator in the heart of cartel-land in Mexico or Latin America.

Do not be fooled.

Every piece of data we have actually shows that to be false.

A CATO Institute study last month found that 2025 — in theory a wildly dangerous year, according to Kristi Noem and other administration officials, when threats and assault against agents and officers leapt by insane astronomical figures, like 413 percent, 1150 percent, or even 8000 percent!!!! — was actually the second-safest year ever for ICE officers and Border Patrol agents.

In fact, CATO calculated, “The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered. We should be much less concerned about their safety.”

The statistics are even more skewed when you just look at ICE. Whereas there are actual homicides and shooting incidents involving the Border Patrol working along the border, being an ICE officer is actually even safer than those CATO statistics imply. While two special agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations side have been killed since 2003, no deportation officer has been murdered in the line of duty since the creation of ICE after 9/11.

You have to go way back to the 1949 to find the one — and only! — on-duty homicide of a deportation agent, back when it was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, when security officer George D. Joyce died after being stabbed while delivering breakfast to a detainee. Which is to say: No deportation officer has ever been killed in a hostile action on America’s streets.

Which is to say: Being an elementary school student in the United States is more deadly than being an ICE officer.

The leading cause of “on-duty death” of ICE officers? Covid.

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick says, “The last time there was even a non-COVID death on duty was 2016, when an officer had a heart attack during a foot pursuit. Before that, a training accident in 2003, then a fall down an elevator shaft at a jail in 1975.” In other words, as I’ve written before, the landscapers and groundskeepers being targeted by ICE are far far far more likely to face injury and death on the job than the ICE officers wrestling them to the ground.

And yet in city after city, day after day, ICE officers and CBP agents charge into American cities dressed as if they’re assaulting Fallujah or elite special forces charging into a Taliban stronghold.

In fact, given that retail workers across America faced 94 workplace homicides in 2023, it stands more to reason that the clerks at Home Depot should be wearing tactical gear as opposed to the swarms of CBP agents and ICE officers storming their parking lots to roust day-laborers.

Nothing is more fundamental to the myth that working for ICE is a dangerous, high-risk occupation than the lore of the masks. The masks, we’re told, are a critical part of protecting the identity of ICE and CBP officers, protecting them from the vague threat of “doxxing,” which presumably could lead to their assault or attacks against their families.

Except, as Philip Bump so thoughtfully and carefully investigated, “A review of DHS and ICE press releases since January 2025, though, indicates that this theoretical scenario has never actually occurred. At no point in time has an officer been seen conducting his work, identified and subsequently attacked.”

Moreover, it’s worth pointing out that up until last year, ICE officers didn’t routinely cover their faces — it’s only been with their rise in aggression and violence on America’s streets that they now operate in such a state of fear that they say they need to be masked. It’s a remarkable and troubling statement about how ICE and CBP have lost moral legitimacy in the eyes of the nation, so much so that agents now fear anyone ever associating themselves with being employed by ICE or CBP. (Plus, as Adam Serwer has argued at The Atlantic, it seems like the masks, more than anything, are a license for impunity and brutality: “Face coverings may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to make it easier for them to do unconstitutional things.”)

It should go without saying that if you can’t police in a free society without hiding your face, the problem is with the policing — not the public.

Indeed, in almost every video we see of ICE and CBP deploying force — including especially the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti — the immigration agents are the ones who initiate the violence, swarming Good’s car or approaching, shoving, pepper-spraying, and beating Pretti in the street.

Often, watching the recklessness with which ICE and CBP agents have operated on America’s streets over the last year, I’ve thought of a conversation I had with a senior FBI official while researching my history of the bureau in the late 2000s. At the time, the Global War on Terror was still in full form, and the FBI had since 9/11 deployed hundreds of agents at a time to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan to work on tasks ranging from counterterrorism investigations to helping the US military study and interdict IEDs. The agent — who had risen to the top ranks of the bureau — had at one point been the commander of FBI’s teams in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and we were discussing a 2009 incident where a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had killed three DEA agents. Sitting in his own executive suite in the FBI offices, he told me how he’d sensed among the bureau’s leadership a certain professional jealousy in watching the reaction of the DEA after those tragic deaths.

“You know,” the agent said, “I always got the impression — not that the leadership wanted any of us individually to get hurt or killed — but that they kind of hoped the bureau would get bloodied at some point so that it would feel like the bureau had made a sacrifice for the war.”

I’ve returned to that conversation and theme watching public remarks in recent months by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Greg Bovino.

In the darkest corners of their hearts, it seems clear that ICE and CBP want their own Horst Wessel moment — a martyr they can celebrate and hold up, their “I told you so” moment to justify their own aggression and violence against American communities.

If you read between the lines of comments and complaints by Miller, Noem, Homan, and Bovino, you can almost sense their frustration at how peaceful the national resistance to ICE has actually been — they have done everything they can to provoke violence, and it’s all fallen short. Day after day, they tell us how the aggression is necessary because of how dangerous the work is — except that it’s not and their evidence keeps crumbling. They’re not staring down cartel death squads — they’re facing inflatable frogs and men in Blackhawk pajamas.

They keep ginning up threats against their leaders that have come to naught — like the supposed “high-ranking gang member” in Chicago who ordered a hit on Greg Bovino, a case that withered in the courtroom and led to the man’s acquittal. Time and again, the department’s charges against “violent protesters” who assault immigration agents have disappeared into the ether.

The reality is that while there have been some brutal assaults on immigration officers over the last year, they’re mostly things like bitten fingers. The only fatal shooting incident targeting an ICE facility actually only killed two detainees, no one from ICE itself, and seems to have been conducted by someone with a history of mental illness.

The reality is that the most famous attack against a federal agent last year, after all, was a man in Washington, D.C., who threw a sandwich at an agent in full body armor — a grand jury refused to indict the “perpetrator,” which seems a laughably strong word to even use, and he was charged instead with a misdemeanor, then acquitted at trial after deliberating for barely two hours. The agent hit by the sandwich had to testify to the grievous injuries he suffered: He had “mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night.”  

And it’s not like DHS isn’t vigorously pursuing every threat it can: The Washington Post last week published a deeply troubling story about how a completely innocuous email to a DHS attorney, using publicly available contact information and sent by a retiree in Pennsylvania, led to a “criminal” DHS investigation that involved armed agents showing up at the man’s house.

(Even more troubling: There’s plenty of evidence that being detained by ICE is far more dangerous and deadly than working for ICE, which — to be clear — it should not be.)

Of all the possible reforms the Congress should insist upon this week at DHS — and I laid out my own suggested reform agenda last week — there’s nothing more meaningful or concrete than banning immigration officers from using masks. It would force ICE and CBP to operate completely differently and remove the cloak of impunity they’ve created for themselves over the last year.

But whenever we settle the question of masks, here’s a more interesting question for reformers: Why, given the reality of the role, should ICE officers be armed at all? 

If you truly want to re-imagine ICE, it’s not entirely clear why what is actually a civil matter — immigration enforcement — should be considered armed federal law enforcement at all? If and when ICE officers actually are going after the so-called “worst of the worst” — which DHS’s own statistics underscore is an increasingly rare case at all, given that just 14 percent of Trump arrests have a violent criminal record — it could always enlist the help of local, state, or other federal armed agents, partners who would presumably be involved anyway in cases that truly did focus on gang members, drug smugglers, murderers, rapists, or human traffickers — and a move that, among other things, would help ensure that ICE officers actually view local and state partners as just that.

Right now, we’re building, equipping, and funding an invading army whose only target is our own neighborhoods. As I said in my testimony last month, “We as a nation must act to change the trajectory of immigration enforcement in our country. America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year — let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.”

GMG

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