Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) introduced a bill on Tuesday seeking to expand identification requirements for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducting sweeps for illegal immigrants.
Concerns have been raised, including in Los Angeles, that ICE officers carrying out raids are doing so without identifying themselves and are, on occasion, concealing their identity with masks. The concerns have led to complaints that federal agents are operating in an authoritarian manner without full transparency, sparking a surge of kidnapping calls to police from outraged residents.
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Although the Trump administration has dismissed unease, arguing that officers need, at times, to conceal their identity due to the steep rise of violence against ICE, Padilla joined forces with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to introduce a bill that would ban federal immigration officers from wearing most face coverings and require them to wear visible ID during public operations.
“When federal immigration agents show up and pull someone off the street in plainclothes with their face obscured and no visible identification, it only escalates tensions and spreads fear while shielding federal agents from basic accountability,” Padilla said in a statement pushing Congress to support the Visible Identification Standards for Immigration-Based Law Enforcement Act. “Immigration agents should be required to display their agency and name or badge number — just like police and other local law enforcement agencies. The VISIBLE Act’s commonsense requirements will restore transparency and ensure impersonators can’t exploit the panic and confusion caused by unidentifiable federal immigration enforcement agents.”
The Trump administration has argued that it is necessary for ICE agents to be allowed to conceal their identity for security purposes, citing a 413% increase in assaults against officers attempting to make arrests. Ten suspects were charged this week with attempting to murder ICE agents at a Texas detention facility in Alvarado.
The anti-ICE sentiment was on full display during the recent Los Angeles protests, some of which turned into riots. Unrest sparked last month due to ICE raids in the city, which residents worried targeted workers in industries heavily reliant on migrant labor. At the time, Trump called in the National Guard to protect ICE as officers conducted sweeps in the area for illegal immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security has also pointed to increasing doxxing threats against agents, including from leading Democratic politicians. Doxxing is a typically malicious practice where someone’s personal information, such as their home address, is made public.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees ICE, told CBS News in a recent interview that masks are “for the safety of those individuals or the work that they’re doing as far as protecting their identity so they can continue to do investigative work.”
Her words come as “No sleep for ICE” protesters have posted the exact locations of ICE agents’ evening whereabouts across Los Angeles County on social media to organize large crowds to disrupt their slumber. The Trump administration has expressed outrage over a new app that alerts users to nearby ICE activity in real-time, even threatening to sue CNN for reporting on the matter, sparking concerns about encroachment of the network’s First Amendment right to cover the “ICEBlock” app.
Top Democrats have compared agents’ identity concealment to Communist activity and Germany’s secret police during the Nazi era, saying that such measures are unwarranted, unconstitutional, and “antithetical to democracy.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has vowed to publicly identify ICE agents and those who are “engaged in this aggressive overreach and are trying to hide their identities from the American people.”
“This is America. This is not the Soviet Union. We’re not behind the Iron Curtain,” the top House Democrat said in June. “And every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will of course be identified.”