DESIGNER

Hailey Reinhardt

PROFILE/DESCRIPTION

Article text courtesy of nytimes.com:

‘ICE Goes Masked for a Single Reason’

 

Among the earliest signs that the second Trump administration might be precipitously different from the first were the masks. Almost the first thought I had, in watching videos of federal agents snatching campus protesters and opinion writers, among many others seized somewhat violently on camera this year, was about what looked like a new anonymity protocol. There were agents wearing masks and others without visible name tags or badges, many operating in plain clothes. Why were so many of these agents trying to hide their identities?

“ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” a federal judge, William Young, wrote in a blistering 161-page First Amendment ruling handed down last week. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” he continued. The judge, a Reagan appointee, compared immigration agents to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and declared that federal efforts to deport outspoken protesters amounted to a “full-throated assault” on freedom of speech. “Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”

Is this a true secret police? The term is darkly tempting, though much of what we’ve observed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection this year has fallen distressingly within the bounds of our brutally capacious immigration law. The National Guard deployments, too, have unfolded in public view. The terroristic sweep of President Trump’s mass deportation program will be repeatedly litigated in the years to come, in courts of both law and public opinion — U.S. citizens arrested by agents apparently uninterested in their immigration status, agents drawing guns on civilian bystanders. And to the extent that many of those officers and their superiors have been not just enforcing laws and executive orders but also engaging in a kind of conspicuous and public cosplay, the costumes they have chosen are those of the enforcement arm of an authoritarian regime. When the masks came on, the mask came off.