Masked ICE Officers Are More Than a Constitutional Question

ICE officials wear generic uniforms displaying ‘police’ while conducting an arrest. Photo courtesy of Erica Knight for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“People are out there taking photos of their names and faces and posting them online with death threats to their families and themselves. So I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is.”  

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons offered this as a response to growing outrage over ICE officials performing immigration arrests while being masked and concealing identifying information, like badge numbers and names. Recent internal data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shows a 500 percent increase in assaults while conducting immigration enforcement operations, equivalent to about one assault per day. The agency frames this statistic as the reason for ICE officers’ anonymity, touting the masks as a necessary shield from public outrage and violence.

Already, this justification for masking triggers concerns about abuses of power, such as uses of excessive force or racial profiling, that can more easily take place when law enforcement cannot be identified. While no federal law explicitly forbids masking, the lack of accountability and due process implications that arise from obstructing officers’ identities is deeply troubling. In response, Democrats in California and New York City have even introduced legislation to ban the practice. While these pieces of legislation are likely to pass in solid blue states, the risk of these ICE practices remains real for the rest of the nation. A lack of transparency from ICE, which will likely continue without the interference of the courts or Congress, invites mistrust in all public officials as the public struggles to distinguish between federal ICE officers and local officials. 

Any future lawsuit regarding the constitutionality of ICE officials’ refusal to identify will take years to play out in federal court. However, the immediate public safety concerns of this practice are being left to the wayside. ICE officials’ failure to identify has created logistical challenges for local law enforcement, as well as confusion and resistance from private individuals, which generates greater, multi-layered public safety issues. 

In a June incident in Los Angeles, ICE officials driving unmarked vehicles crashed into another car while making an arrest. LAPD responded to the incident as a typical hit and run because the ICE officials lacked any clear identification and federal law enforcement, and did not inform local law enforcement of their activities beforehand. Similar incidents repeatedly occur, both in Los Angeles and across the country, like ICE’s failure to coordinate with local authorities in Kingston, New York. 

While ICE, as a federal agency, does not have an obligation to inform local authorities of its activities, the agency’s choice to operate alone allows for further confusion and distraction to develop within police departments. A lack of clarity regarding who is and is not an agent of the federal government causes local police to inadvertently disregard their actual duties to respond to reports of potential kidnapping calls and other crimes. Only when police are on-site and confronted with the chaotic work of ICE officials, who often act recklessly and violently, can they actually understand what the agency is doing locally. This conflict between local and federal law enforcement leads to greater confusion, ultimately undermining what should be law enforcement’s primary goal: ensuring public safety.  

Complicating this issue further, an absence of formal identification, alongside ICE’s enforcement strategies, fosters growing mistrust of all law enforcement agencies among the public. Often, ICE officials will only identify themselves as ‘police’ to individuals, failing to clarify that they are a part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or even the federal government. Unlike a choice in uniform, this ‘ruse’ is more deliberate and has been a commonly used tactic for years. However, recent increases in ICE arrests will doubtlessly cause more fear for not just ICE but also general law enforcement, especially in the communities most vulnerable to immigration enforcement. When communities feel unable to assess who is a member of the local police versus an ICE agent, it is simply logical that many civilians will stop approaching local law enforcement to report crimes or seek help out of fear. Without honest self-identification, the recent increases in ICE arrests will inevitably create a general fear of law enforcement. Since trust is such an essential component of effective law enforcement, ICE's practices continue to undermine it and jeopardize public safety.

Beyond confusion and logistical challenges with local police, ICE’s failure to properly identify itself has allowed for even more malicious criminal activity to take place. Within an atmosphere of fear, incidents of private citizens impersonating ICE have been on the rise. In South Carolina and Pennsylvania, several men have been charged with criminal offenses after pretending to be ICE officers to intimidate Latino people, using costumes showcasing the words ‘police’ or ‘ICE’ on their backs. In another case out of North Carolina, a man allegedly used his ‘position’ as an ICE officer to sexually assault a woman after he threatened to deport her. The man even presented the victim with a falsified business card to convince her that he was a member of ICE. In these incidents, a commonality is clear–the lack of a uniform or an easily verifiable way to identify ICE officers provides an opportunity for individuals to impersonate federal agents and victimize others. 

Moreover, the increasingly polarized perceptions of ICE have led to resistance from individuals and communities. Narciso Barranco, the father of three U.S. Marines and an immigrant who was pending legal status after having lived in the United States for decades, was arrested by masked ICE officers and characterized by DHS officials as ‘resisting’ because he walked away from the masked agents. His son clarified that the masks worn by ICE officers and their liberal use of force scared his father, despite his knowledge that ICE was searching for undocumented people in the Los Angeles area. While this particular incident made national news, the escalation of tensions created by a law enforcement official being masked is hardly unique. If it was DHS or ICE’s true intentions to protect officers by allowing them to wear masks, incidents like Narciso Barranco’s arrest only give credence to the argument that masking escalates a simple arrest of someone with no criminal history to an intense intimidation due to confusion and fear. 

Despite claims from ICE and DHS about the need to protect ICE officers, clearly, the lack of clear identification creates more risks than it does dissuade anyone from harming law enforcement. A simple solution–a standard uniform and verbal identification of being an ICE officer–is easy to imagine, but seems politically impossible under the current party makeup of Congress. Without the political will in either Congress or DHS leadership for policy change, the issue of ICE’s masks and lack of clear identification will continue to harm vulnerable immigrant communities and broader public safety.

Gabi Fabozzi (BC ’28) is a sophomore studying political science and a Yale Law School Liman Summer Fellow. She can be reached at glf2126@barnard.edu.