Americans do not like masked secret police. There is really no other way to put it. The reasons why are manifold: accountability, trust in law enforcement, and just plain overall vibes. More concretely, not being able to tell who’s a cop and who’s not is dangerous. An assassin masquerading as law enforcement killed Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband last year. How is anyone supposed to tell whether they’re being dragged out of their home in their underwear by ICE or by mere amateur thugs?
Last year, California passed the No Secret Police Act, which restricts masking for federal law enforcement, alongside the No Vigilantes Act, which requires law enforcement to wear some form of identification. The Department of Homeland Security immediately sued to enjoin the law on constitutional grounds; a judge has not yet ruled on whether to grant a preliminary injunction.
State legislatures all over the country continued to introduce their own anti-masking bills
Bills that ban masks on ICE agents have been introduced in Congress — from the identically-named No Secret Police Act in the House to the VISIBLE Act in the Senate — but with Republican majorities in both chambers, neither of these bills are expected to become federal law. State legislatures have moved ahead without waiting for Washington, DC. Even after DHS sued to block California’s law, state legislatures all over the country continued to introduce their own anti-masking bills.
State legislatures that introduced bills last summer have slowly begun moving on them; just this past month, states like Maryland, Vermont, Washington, and Georgia introduced new bills. Los Angeles passed a city ordinance; the city of St. Paul is considering one as well. A Minnesota lawmaker says she will introduce her own bill when the session opens in February. Besides California, at least 15 state legislatures have their own anti-masking bills pending.
For their part, ICE has clung to the gaiters like life support. In an interview on Face the Nation last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused moderator Margaret Brennan of “doxxing” Jonathan Ross, the man who has been identified as the ICE agent who shot Renee Good despite his use of a face-obscuring gaiter in the many videos taken during the shooting.
“Don’t say his name, for heaven’s sakes. We shouldn’t have people continue to doxx law enforcement when they have an 8,000 percent increase in death threats against them,” Noem scolded Brennan. When Brennan pointed out that his name was public knowledge, Noem responded, “I know but that doesn’t mean it should continue to be said.”
“The threats to federal officers are serious and potentially deadly,” the US Department of Justice claimed in its lawsuit to enjoin the No Secret Police Act. A list of such threats includes “taunting” and “online doxxing.”
A press release on the Department of Homeland Security website claims that death threats against ICE agents have increased 8,000 percent, and that assaults have increased 1,300 percent. The web page consists mostly of a lot of blurry screenshots of X posts. There are a handful of photos of injuries supposedly suffered by ICE agents — two photos of a hand bleeding from what is supposed to be a bite, and another photo (face partially obscured) of an agent with a busted lip.
This 1,300 percent increase in the kind of blood loss you’d get from a minor skateboarding injury is not a particularly compelling reason to allow law enforcement to wear masks. Noem sounds like a clown when she goes on about ICE agents getting doxxed. But she’s a clown with the law on her side.
California’s No Secret Police Act faces an uphill battle in the courts. For one thing, the law targets federal law enforcement but doesn’t apply the same requirements to local police. If that were the only problem that would just be a matter of fixing the wording. But unfortunately for the 15 similar bills are pending in other state legislatures, the most fundamental issue at play — the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution — gives the feds an advantage. States have a very limited capacity to affect how the feds do their jobs: that is sort of the point of federalism, after all. One legal expert claims that it is “clear” that the No Secret Police Act is constitutionally invalid; another makes the much more optimistic assessment that “under existing precedent, mask bans are neither clearly prohibited nor clearly permissible.”
But this being an open question of law is a bizarre insult to the conscience. It’s not just that it’s perfectly legal for ICE to mask themselves, it really might be illegal for the state of California to try and stop them.
Normal people despise the masks. Only 31 percent of Americans think ICE agents should be allowed to wear them. Even the sheltered, shrinking bubble of Republicans — whose approval of ICE floats somewhere between 70 and 80 percent — falters in enthusiasm when it comes to what ICE agents are wearing. (63 percent of Republicans are okay with the masks, but a majority of Republicans think agents should be in uniform.) After a Reagan-appointed federal judge heard out the reasoning for the masks, he called it “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable,” saying that “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”
Most judges aren’t weird little internet forum trolls for whom doxxing is the greatest imaginable threat
When faced with the Trump administration’s single-minded obsession with “doxxing,” judges have often been either bemused or enraged. Part of this may be that most judges aren’t weird little internet forum trolls for whom doxxing is the greatest imaginable threat anyone can face. But more importantly, a federal judge — whose name and face are a matter of public record — frequently makes decisions likely to piss off very dangerous and violent people. The idea that an officer of the law must be faceless to do their job is an insult to their own line of work.
Cops, too, are not entirely sold on the masks — the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a resolution warning against the use of face masks. In an interview with NPR last year, the head of the organization called face coverings “a real slippery slope,” saying that the masks undermined police legitimacy. “We feel strongly that the face coverings are inappropriate in most cases in policing in a democratic society in 2025,” he said.
This comes up in California’s defense of the No Secret Police Act and No Vigilantes Act — showing a face and a badge has long been a standard practice for policing at both the federal and local level. “Before January 2025, when the practice of conducting civil immigration enforcement in masks and without identifiers began, officers generally wore an ‘ICE’ or ‘ICE POLICE’ insignia with visible badge and number,” the state of California wrote in its response to Homeland Security’s lawsuit.
The state conceded that “while all law enforcement agents should be entitled to protection from harassment and doxxing,” it charged DHS with offering “no evidence that masking or refusing to wear a badge or identification number—practices virtually unheard of before 2025—does anything to ameliorate this risk.”
The masks aren’t normal. Americans don’t like them. The fact that California’s attempt to ban them is in dicey legal territory is a strong indicator that things have gone seriously sideways.
Policy ought to reflect the will of the people in a democratic society. California should not be in court defending its law from the Supremacy Clause, because it should not have had to pass the law in the first place. In a saner world, Congress would have passed a federal version of the No Secret Police Act; in an even saner one, the executive branch would be at all responsive to the objections of voters, and would have stopped the practice entirely.
Faceless officials with guns and body armor are crying about how scared they are of having their names on the internet, while shooting unarmed Americans in the face. The American system of government was not meant to be this unmoored from reality; normal constitutional workings are under strain because the federal government is too internet-addled to tell the difference between doxxing and murder. California’s No Secret Police Act is the backup generator turning on because the entire grid has collapsed. If it does manage to survive in court, it won’t be enough to save our democracy. And if it is struck down — well, there’s no backup for the backup generator.