ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy

The Intercept

20 hours ago

Dozens of immigrants are detained by ICE agents inside the Federal Plaza courthouse in New York City on June 26, 2025, following their legal proceedings. Photo: Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
There's nothing subtle about the Gestapo-style tactics of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Armed gangs of officers, often masked and anonymous, are openly engaged in a white nationalist mission to kidnap many thousands of people — stalking court houses, farms, construction sites, and retail stores, and ripping apart the fabric of communities nationwide.
The Trump administration wants America paying attention to this sickening spectacle of mass deportations: broadcasting ICE raids featuring television personality Dr. Phil; meme-posting chained men sent to a gulag in El Salvador; and sharing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's various 'ICE Barbie' photo ops.
What the Trump administration doesn't want, however, is for anyone to hold ICE agents accountable. Attempts by the public to keep tabs on ICE are provoking predictable and pathetic responses from the government.
The latest cause of outrage is ICEBlock, an app that lets users share local ICE sightings. On Monday, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons condemned the app and called CNN 'reckless and irresponsible' for broadcasting a brief interview with its developer.
'Advertising an app that basically paints a target on federal law enforcement officers' backs is sickening,' said Lyons. 'My officers and agents are already facing a 500% increase in assaults, and going on live television to announce an app that lets anyone zero in on their locations is like inviting violence against them with a national megaphone.'
CNN did not, of course, advertise the app. The network interviewed its developer, Joshua Aaron, because it is newsworthy that 20,000 users, many based in Los Angeles, are looking for ways to share information and keep people safe. Public ICE sightings are just that: public. ICEBlock is just one example of a larger story of autonomous, community efforts nationwide to share such information, be it in large Signal threads or social media alerts. Sharing this information is protected speech and a public service.
The Trump administration has shown its readiness to take extreme measures against efforts to share information about ICE's troops. In early May, federal agents stormed a home in Irvine, California, in a massive, military-style raid based on suspicions that the residents' son may have been involved with the placement of posters around Los Angeles that shared information about ICE officers.
ICE watch groups and rapid-response networks have proliferated as a necessary response to Trump's supercharged deportation agenda. Such efforts are not new but sit in the honorable tradition of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s to protect and shelter refugees, as well as local Copwatch networks, which have existed for over three decades as community efforts against law enforcement violence and impunity.
The agency's response is itself in line with a storied tradition in U.S. law enforcement and broader efforts to shore up a white supremacist order. Namely, painting the oppressor as the victim and the real victim as the dangerous threat. In his statement about CNN's ICEBlock segment, Lyons regurgitated the all-too-typical law enforcement claim that 'the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day' are endangered when their total impunity is threatened.
The '500% increase in assaults' against ICE officers that Lyons cited has been a statistic repeated ad nauseam by Trump administration officials as grounds for agents covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves as they grab people from the street or tear them from the arms of their neighbors and loved ones. The number remains completely unverified.
Keep in mind, too, that 'assault' in this context is a term practically evacuated of meaning. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said that New York City Comptroller Brad Lander 'was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer' when he was detained by masked federal agents while accompanying a person out of immigration court in June. The Justice Department charged New Jersey Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver with 'assaulting' an ICE officer when the member of Congress attempted to conduct an oversight visit at an ICE detention facility. Both incidents were filmed, and claims that federal officers were assaulted by either politician are nonsense.
Trump administration officials have touted footage on social media purporting to show assaults against ICE officers. What these videos overwhelmingly show are unarmed civilians swarmed by militarized forces. During a workplace raid in Santa Ana, California, for example, three federal agents brutally tackled a man, pinned him to the floor, and repeatedly punched his head and neck in a now viral video. The Department of Homeland Security later posted a video on X of the man holding a weed wacker tool in the air while attempting to move away from a heavily armed, masked agent who was spraying some sort of pepper spray in his direction. 'He ASSAULTED federal law enforcement with a WEED WHACKER [sic],' DHS wrote above the video, which showed nothing of the sort.
The abject performance of victimhood is absurd, but it's also the foundation of our entire border regime and criminal legal system, which rest on treating poor Black and brown people as a constant threat. Calls for accountability have long been met with patently melodramatic and false claims of danger to law enforcement officials in defense of racist policing. Police departments and unions have for decades employed the strategy of 'blue flu' strikes to protest even minor calls for reform. Hundreds of police officers in New York famously turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio during a fellow officer's funeral in 2014, because the mayor had dared to acknowledge he understood the reasons to protest racist police killings. Such is the entrenched culture of expected impunity.
The danger of American immigration policy is faced by immigrants.
Being a well-armed officer carrying out state violence is, however, not even in the top 10 most dangerous professions; roofers, loggers, and garbage collectors all have higher rates of fatal injury than regular police officers. Working as an ICE officer is even less dangerous than being an ordinary cop. Yet the entire mass deportations project relies on the lie that poor immigrants of color are a social danger — a myth bolstered by years of bipartisan policies around 'criminal' migrants and anti-immigration discourse. Despite the fact that 65 percent of the 60,000-plus ICE arrests during Trump's second term have been of immigrants with no criminal convictions, Trump's servants like Lyons are nonetheless framing ICE targets as 'dangerous criminal aliens.'
The danger of American immigration policy is faced by immigrants. As many as 80,000 people have reportedly died trying to cross into the U.S. through the Southern border in the last decade — each a victim of migration deterrence policies. Thirteen people have died in ICE custody in 2025 alone. A 75-year-old Cuban national died in an ICE detention center just last week; he had lived 60 years of his life in the U.S. When asked by a reporter on Monday about the latest death on his watch, Trump's border czar Tom Homan shrugged. 'I'm unaware of that,' he said. 'I mean people die in ICE custody, people die in county jail, people die in state prisons.'
It takes the blind conviction of white nationalism, or the no-less-evil pretenses of a cynical propagandist, to claim that it is federal agents, rather than the immigrants they hunt, who are at risk.
So what's the real reason for the masks? ICE agents, of course, have reasons they'd prefer not to be located or identified. They have no desire to face protesters who mobilize in response to reports of their presence. They wear masks to avoid being held personally responsible for carrying out the regime's desired acts of cruelty.
Keep in mind that the mask isn't the core problem but a tool that worsens it. Were ICE agents carrying out the project of whitening America with bare faces and name badges, their activities would be just as fascist. Racist policing and border rule did not begin this year and has never been reliant on law enforcement agents acting in secret.
But ICE's new tendency to act in anonymous uniformity, without even the possibility for personal responsibility or individual consequences, no doubt helps when carrying out orders that require the extreme dehumanization of others.
If we stick to the liberal parlance of transparency and accountability, there should be nothing radical about public oversight and information-sharing, or protest against unpopular state actions. There should also be nothing radical about protecting vulnerable neighbors from fascist round-ups, either.