A Disturbing Sign We’ve Accepted a “New Normal” From Trump

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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.”

Foley should know that disclosing restricted personal information about federal employees is already a crime, as is threatening them or their families. Allowing agents to mask indiscriminately doesn’t just protect them; it also risks emboldening them to stretch the boundaries of the law. We’re already aware of the risk of allowing law enforcement agents to act anonymously—it’s why police officers have badge numbers. And while recent polls show Americans divided on their overall support for ICE, a substantial majority say that agents should be required to wear uniforms, and less than 40 percent say they should be allowed to cover their faces.

Even if you accept that there are some circumstances in which agents need to conceal their identity, there’s something profoundly jarring about how quickly the sight of masked agents detaining unarmed civilians has become a commonplace. In a different context (like, say, an Oscar-winning film set during Brazil’s military dictatorship), the specter of faceless men grabbing people off the streets is instantly recognizable as the mark of a totalitarian society. But here, it’s become almost commonplace, like a nagging car alarm.

Given that ICE has, according to its own statistics, deported more than 65,000 people in Trump’s first 100 days and currently has another 50,000 in custody, often in blatant defiance of orders from federal judges, wearing masks is arguably somewhere low on the list of the agency’s most egregious offenses. But I can’t stop thinking about the rapid normalization and what it means about how quickly we have processed this Trump term. It’s a basic principle of civil society that the increased power given to law enforcement officials is balanced by increased oversight, because the one without the other presents an almost irresistible temptation for abuse. Yesterday, two California lawmakers put forth a bill to ban local, state, and federal law enforcement officials from covering their faces while on the job, because, as the bill’s co-author Sen. Scott Weiner put it, “We’re at the risk of having, effectively, secret police in this country.” The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, responded with a social media post calling the proposed law “despicable.”

This has been the playbook. After Brad Lander was arrested (he was released later in the afternoon), DHS official Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement accusing him of “assaulting law enforcement.” This echoed the incident last week when California Senator Jose Padilla was thrown to the ground and handcuffed after he’d shouted out his name and attempted to ask Kristi Noem a question during a press conference. DHS accused of him of “lung[ing]” towards Noem despite numerous videos showing he did nothing of the sort. As Padilla was shoved out of the room by the Secret Service, you could hear Noem going on about ICE agents being “doxed for doing their duty,” once again claiming that being able to put a name to an agent of state enforcement presents an intolerable risk.

And yet when it came to explaining why a U.S. Senator had been put in handcuffs—why, in fact, the incident was entirely his fault, and placing a federal lawmaker in custody did not warrant so much as an apology—Noem had a simple explanation. Padilla, she told Fox News, “did not identify himself.”

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