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.
The cosplay is now bleeding into state violence, and even for those used to pointing fingers and calling out authoritarianism, the past week has been a precipitous escalation: Trump speaking of the “enemy from within” as a national defense strategy waiting for approval proposes focusing the military on domestic threats and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, compares political opposition to terrorism; a military-style raid on a Chicago apartment complex; local police officers hit with tear gas from ICE agents.
The footage continued through the weekend, much of it horrifying. But at least we saw it.
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Last Friday, the 48-year-old Emmy-winning reporter Mario Guevara was deported to El Salvador from an ICE detention facility in Folkston, Ga. He was held in detention there for over 100 days. The state’s filings concerning his detention seem to largely focus on the crime of committing journalism.
Guevara was arrested in June at a No Kings rally outside Atlanta, where, while filming the protest for his livestreaming platform MG News, he (clearly wearing a press vest and keeping his distance from both protesters and law enforcement) briefly stepped into a roadway. Within days, the charges against him were dropped. But instead of being released, he was transferred to ICE custody. And although an immigration judge granted him bond, finding him neither dangerous nor a flight risk, the government appealed it, arguing that his recording of law enforcement activity itself constituted a danger. And so Guevara — whose work primarily documents immigration enforcement actions, which he often livestreams to hundreds of thousands of followers — was kept in ICE detention. Meanwhile, his immigration case was reopened, and eventually deportation proceedings commenced.