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In a column published on June 19th, Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump wrote:
Last month, I wrote a column questioning why Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were increasingly disguising their identities as they conducted sweeps and arrests. One obvious answer was that they hoped to avoid accountability for their actions, making it harder to say precisely who had plucked up a college student or local mother and sent them to jail in another state pending deportation.
He noted that he had emailed ICE “multiple times” asking where its claim of a 413% increase in assaults against ICE agents had come from. He noted that he received no response. His own examination of statistics from Customs and Border Protection showed that assaults were running 20% lower than in 2024 year-to-date.
Bump concluded:
[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. That the organization would not provide evidence for its claims, that it has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators and that it conflates assaults of officers engaged in official acts with putative threats to them personally all diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt.
Leaving the question I posed in May: Why are these officers covering their faces if not to avoid accountability?
Bump’s question is both urgent and relevant. In a democracy, the legitimacy of authority rests on accountability to the people. That accountability is eroded when agents of the state hide their identities behind masks, absence of uniforms, and unmarked vehicles on a widespread basis. Although there can be legitimate basis for a small number of such cases, widespread usage of such tactics is incompatible with democracy, rule of law, or accountability. Barring extraordinary and credible evidence, there is no justification for widespread use of such practices in a free and democratic society.
Anonymity makes it difficult to ensure that basic constitutional rights are protected. It makes it difficult to hold perpetrators responsible for abuses accountable for their actions. Widespread use of such practices poses a genuine threat to liberty and inflicts real harm on a free society. That threat and the harm inflicted from such practices far outweigh any of the justifications for the widespread use of anonymity.
Historic experience shows that masked enforcers thrive in authoritarian regimes where fear replaces law and impunity replaces justice. In contrast, transparency binds free societies to truth, trust, and the rule of law. The increasing use of masked agents who are abducting people in a growing number of American communities is corroding American democracy. Those anonymous abductions pose a far greater threat to free society than the vast majority of those being seized by force.
Should such practices become normalized, that development would be a seismic shift in the relationship between the government and the governed. When enforcement becomes indistinguishable from abduction, and authority wears a mask rather than a badge, a democratic society drifts into dangerous territory. The citizen, once empowered by rights and protected by law, becomes a potential target in a landscape where due process is obscured and accountability is optional, if it exists at all. The power to act without a name or face is the power to silence, suppress, and disappear dissent without consequence. It is the power feared in dictatorships. It should never be tolerated in any republic founded on liberty.
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