You Should Be Able to Tell Who's an ICE Agent

Mint

2 days ago

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Back in March, when masked, hoodie-clad federal immigration agents were caught on camera grabbing a Tufts University student off a sidewalk and forcing her into an unmarked vehicle, it was shocking.
'Why are you hiding your faces?' a bystander can be heard asking.
It hasn't taken long for such aggressive tactics to become the norm in many US cities. But perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in and around Los Angeles, where President Donald Trump has decided to focus his administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, going so far as to bring in the National Guard and Marines over the objections of California officials.
LA is full of agents, from Border Patrol and Immigration to Customs Enforcement to Homeland Security Investigations, many of whom aren't easy to identify. In the resulting confusion, police officers are getting mistaken for those agents. The trust that's so critical for local law enforcement to persuade people to report crimes, regardless of their immigration status, is eroding. And fear and paranoia are high that some of the masked people walking around with guns and chasing people aren't federal agents at all, but criminals pretending to be law enforcement. There's a real worry about the overall impact on public safety.
California state Senator Sasha Renee Perez, who is sponsoring a bill to make federal agents display identification, told me police chiefs recognize the 'very dangerous' situation the Trump administration has created with its raids. She says she introduced her bill because she didn't know what to tell constituents after masked agents caused a panic in her district by pulling a high-powered rifle from the trunk of a car in a busy parking lot.
'They were asking, 'How will we be able to identify whether or not somebody's actually an ICE agent?' And 'I'm just supposed to get in a car with any masked person with a gun who claims that they're ICE?''
Numerous elected officials have been asking the same questions, given that criminals have been known to impersonate ICE agents. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger is convinced that a staffer's Latino godson was approached by two impersonators in an unmarked car. They told him he had a 'nice truck for someone with that surname' and tried to open the door.
Lately, not a day seems to pass without a new viral video showing armed men in ski masks or neck gaiters climbing out of unmarked vehicles with out-of-state plates. Sometimes they wear tactical vests that say 'POLICE,' but almost never with name tags or badge numbers. And when bystanders ask whether they are federal agents, which agency they work for and whether they have a warrant, the men – and it's mostly men – typically refuse to answer.
There are many reasons these tactics are problematic, including the basic affront to civil liberties. Americans, after all, are accustomed to seeing the faces of law enforcement and being able to demand identification. That transparency goes a long way toward creating the conditions for public safety.
What's required is not just trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve, but also some level of communication and coordination among government agencies. Little of the latter is happening though, California Democrats continue to say. The Trump administration would likely blame the state's 'sanctuary' law for that. But nothing prohibits notifications to city or state officials about upcoming operations.
Nevertheless, in that vacuum of information, tension and confusion have been allowed to build between the public and federal immigration agents.
In suburban Pasadena, for example, elected officials have been left to guess about the identity of a man in a 'POLICE' vest who aimed a gun at a group of pedestrians. They assume he was a federal agent because he turned on the car's red and blue emergency lights before driving away. But local police weren't told of any operations.
'One question is this a law enforcement agent or someone pretending to be a law enforcement agent, and there is no good answer here,' Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo told the Los Angeles Times.
Elsewhere, protesters have confronted undercover police detectives, thinking they were federal agents. 'It is not safe for our officers, or for others involved in any active police operations if misrepresentations or misunderstandings lead to inappropriate engagement,' Michael Dorsey, police chief of the city of Fontana, wrote on Facebook.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department reported that its fleet of unmarked vehicles has been targeted, too. 'All white vehicles are NOT ICE,' it posted -- and then deleted – on X. And the mayor of Huntington Park has gone so far as to propose directing his city's police to make federal agents identify themselves before raids, which he called 'state-sanctioned intimidation.'
California state Senator Scott Wiener, who has introduced a bill to prohibit federal agents from covering their faces, called the situation 'combustible.' (If enacted, such a bill, much like Perez's, would probably be impossible to enforce.)
Why the secrecy? Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, insists it's not about 'intimidation.' It's 'because they've been doxxed by the thousands,' he recently told the New York Times podcast The Daily. 'Their families have been doxxed. ICE officers' pictures have shown up on trees and telephone poles. Death threats are sky high.'
That is probably true, and if so, it's a problem. Nevertheless, letting law enforcement operate in masked secrecy, chasing down people without having to provide warrants or identification, is not a viable solution.
'Who are these people?' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass asked at a recent press conference. 'And frankly, the vests that they have on look like they ordered them from Amazon. Are they bounty hunters? Are they vigilantes? If they're federal officials, why is it that they do not identify themselves?'
These are questions that deserve answers. That there are none forthcoming from the Trump administration is just further evidence that despite what Trump says about upholding 'law and order,' the administration's deportations of random dishwashers, day laborers and landscapers has nothing to do with public safety.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.
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