The Real Reason ICE Agents Wear Masks GIFT article
Face coverings may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to make it easier for them to do unspeakable AND unconstitutional things.
www.theatlantic.com
Feb 2, 2026
This article is packed with amazing insights to share with lawmakers. “The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered.” Agents are the criminals, not the victims of their enforcement efforts. Data show it.
The masks are there so the agents feel emboldened to bulldoze everyone’s rights, wreck lives and to sew max terror.
The masks may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to to make it easier for them to do unspeakable things.
The crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States,” Graff writes.” Statistically speaking, “worst of the worst” seems to describe CBP and the Border Patrol as law-enforcement agencies better than it does the people they’re rounding up.
ICE does not have the same history of criminal behavior, but it does share a long record of abusing its powers and mistreating people in its custody. Put succinctly, these agencies deal with people the American system has frequently treated as barely human. Now these agents have been unleashed on Americans. Putting masks on people in agencies with internal cultures like these was always a recipe for catastrophe. The Trump administration took the most corrupt, poorly trained, and impulsive law-enforcement agencies in the country, gave them masks, and turned them against American cities.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/masks-ice-immigration/685834/?gift=IxKxvkmYfb46GPYTbytNCZZh4WLQlcCxB8-uAUZwCPk
This article is packed with amazing insights to share with lawmakers. “The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered.” Agents are the criminals, not the victims of their enforcement efforts. Data show it. Etc etc Tge masks are there so the agents feel emboldened to bulldoze everyone’s rights, wreck lives and to sew max terror.
If people can wield power over life and death without showing their face, we have a gang of criminals—not a police force.
The unhinged behavior that we have seen from federal immigration officials, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot while drawing attention to or recording agents’ behavior, is a direct consequence of power without accountability. On Sunday, ProPublica revealed the names of the two agents involved in the Pretti shooting: Border Patrol officer Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Suffice it to say that two Hispanic Americans killing a white person trying to prevent them from harassing or deporting other Hispanic people, on the orders of Stephen Miller—a Jewish American whose ancestors fled pogroms in Eastern Europe—is a uniquely grotesque expression of the American melting pot in action.
The great majority of Somali and Hispanic residents of the Twin Cities area have legal status, but that seems to make no difference: Federal agents are indiscriminately stopping, detaining, and arresting people on the basis of little more than their accent or skin color, in violation of their due-process rights, a lawsuit from the ACLU contends. In Salem, Oregon, an American was hospitalized after reportedly being dragged from her car by immigration agents demanding her papers; she is among the dozens of Americans who, ProPublica reported in October, have been physically abused or detained for extended periods by immigration agents. The real number was probably greater then; it is certainly greater now.
Even regular cops are not immune to being profiled by ICE and the Border Patrol. “We’ve had many instances of people being stopped, family members of police officers being stopped that are American citizens,“ Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told The New York Times. “They’re not stopping family members of folks who are Norwegian or Irish. That’s not happening.” Twin Cities residents being racially profiled by federal agents can thank Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who blew a giant hole in the Fourteenth Amendment in a shadow-docket case in September. A later attempt by Kavanaugh to walk back his disastrous concurrence hasn’t altered federal agents’ conduct.
When violating the Constitution on a daily basis a mask helps, because people who are assured that they won’t face consequences for abusing power almost inevitably do so. One wonders if this is actually the government’s purpose in masking them. When you are asking men to essentially make war on their fellow citizens—to force lightly dressed people out into the frigid Minneapolis winter, detain elementary schoolers, follow good Samaritans as they deliver food to hiding families, and drag, tackle, beat, tase, or even shoot American citizens—you may find telling them that they can keep their identity hidden useful. The masks may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to to make it easier for them to do unspeakable things.
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