As Trump’s immigration crackdown continues, ethics questions are being raised over the use of masked federal agents
By Emma Tucker, CNN
(CNN) — As the Trump administration continues to expand its deportation actions, startling scenes have emerged in recent weeks of masked federal agents in plain clothes detaining international students on campus or near their homes, raising serious questions about those tactics and their authority to wear face coverings.
There is no federal policy dictating when officers can or should cover their faces during arrests, but historically they have almost always worn them only while performing undercover work to protect the integrity of ongoing investigations, law enforcement experts told CNN.
Practices have seemingly changed due to the concern agents will be targeted as a byproduct of the Trump administration’s policies, in a climate where the average person can use technology to expose an officer’s personal information, said Jerry Robinette, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security special agent in charge, who currently serves as a consultant for law enforcement agencies.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration has taken aim at pro-Palestinian student activists and critics of Israel’s policies. Immigration advocates, attorneys and civil litigators are warning against the normalization of federal agents concealing their faces while detaining nonviolent students.
It is standard procedure for ICE officers and other agents from the Department of Homeland Security to wear plain clothes during field operations if they properly identify themselves as a law enforcement officer, according to John Miller, CNN’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.
But the issue of using masks to deliberately cover the faces of people involved in the operations has become a “lightning rod,” as footage from the detentions – which may have received less attention had the agents followed typical protocols – have “suddenly become high interest,” Miller said.
“It raises the question, if they are legitimate law enforcement agents carrying out a proper arrest under the law, why are they hiding their identities?” Miller said.
Masks under scrutiny
The optics are striking because historically in the US, agents have almost always gone without face coverings when arresting some of the country’s most dangerous criminals – such as John Gotti, the head of the Gambino crime family, or the cartel boss El Chapo – unlike in countries like Mexico, Italy or those in the Eastern Bloc, according to Miller and John Sandweg, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and former acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.
While the doxxing threat is “real,” Miller said, the detentions are under scrutiny because they’re not being conducted in “crowded demonstrations where they are surrounded by people with cameras and phones, recording video, but in discreet locations like residences, street corners and parking lots.”
Critics of the tactic say the Trump administration is engaging in a “double standard” by demanding bans on masks on college campuses, such as Columbia University, while allowing officers to wear them. One such critic is Eric Lee, a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the immigration attorney for several student visa holders involved in protests, including Cornell University student Momodou Taal who decided to leave the country after his visa was revoked.
“It would be amusing if it wasn’t so dangerous and hypocritical,” Lee said. “The students I’m talking to are looking out the window, wondering if every car with tinted windows is filled with ICE agents coming to snatch and disappear them.”
Video shows agents with masks as students are detained
Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk was physically restrained by six plainclothes officers, most of whom were wearing face coverings, close to Tufts University’s Somerville, Massachusetts, campus where she is a PhD student.
Öztürk is one of several foreign nationals affiliated with prestigious American universities to be detained for purported activities related to terrorist organizations amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They include Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent Palestinian activist taken into custody last month outside his Columbia University apartment, who referred to his detention as “an abduction” in a letter to Columbia University.
Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, said in a statement last month: “He was chosen as an example to stifle entirely lawful dissent, in violation of the First Amendment. The government’s objective is as transparent as it is unlawful.”
Surveillance video from Öztürk’s detention appears to show the six plainclothes officers casually approaching her and, shortly afterward, the officers all pull cloth coverings over their mouths and noses, some of them wearing sunglasses, as one of them restrains the student’s hands behind her back.
As the officers say, “We’re the police,” a person not seen in the video can be heard responding, “Yeah, you don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”
Sandweg said it is unlikely the officers were directed by agency leaders to wear face coverings during the detentions. ICE is the principal investigative arm of DHS.
Individual officers have “a lot of discretion” in the field, he said, adding: “This is probably something that was informally discussed in the strategy prior to factoring the arrest.”
As he watched footage of the student’s detention, Sandweg said: “The level of force they bring to bear here … I mean there’s a whole bunch of agents. That’s a lot of officers to arrest a noncriminal student.”
The officers did not show their badges until she was restrained, the video shows. Now, she is being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana.
Similarly, Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri was detained by DHS officers who were “brandishing weapons” and wore black masks covering their faces, his attorney Nermeen Arastu told CNN. Suri was taken to the same ICE facility in Louisiana, before being moved to Texas, according to the DHS.
Their attorneys have denied claims made by the government about their activities.
When asked by CNN why officers have opted to use masks when detaining students, a DHS spokesman said: “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as police while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected terrorist sympathizers.”
The use of face coverings has ‘two competing issues’ at play
Immigration attorney Lee said individual agents should be identified, saying they are “responsible for disappearing people who are here on visas and have First Amendment rights.”
The State Department has revoked dozens of student visas around the country in recent weeks, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and statements from universities.
The methods are seemingly adopted by those of “secret police,” Lee contended, which have been established by nationalist governments to exert political and social control.
“People have to fight this before it’s too late because they’ll be next. Being a citizen will not protect them, being against the demonstrations will not protect them,” Lee continued.
On the other side, the statement from DHS underscores what Miller, Robinette and Sandweg say is a larger concern of protecting the identities of officers who could be personally targeted or harassed in the context of a politically charged environment and backlash to the Trump administration’s policies.
“They are easy targets regardless of why these folks are being arrested by the agents,” Robinette said, describing the officers. For those who might expose agents’ identities online, he added, “In my experience, it’s those who have very little to lose by these acts who we are concerned about. Not to mention the very active groups who will exploit sources to learn about these agents’ personal lives and families, targeting them for harassment and other forms of doxxing.”
An exclusive report by The Associated Press in June 2020 revealed personal information of police officers nationwide – including home addresses, emails and phone numbers – had been leaked on social media.
Citing an unclassified intelligence document from DHS, the AP highlighted specific incidents, including at least one police commissioner who was “targeted for his alleged support of the use of tear gas to disperse protests,” according to the report, obtained by the news organization.
There are two competing issues, Miller says, because on the other hand, there should be a policy on masks: “Do we really want to end up in a place where federal law enforcement agencies turn into masked men showing up in the night?”
In the post-2020 national protest era where activists became more adept at publicly identifying officers, Miller said it has led to officers being harassed at home or “exposed widely on the internet and narratives being placed about brutal militaristic tactics being used by government agents.”
Immigration attorney Lee said it’s a “laughable excuse” for the Trump administration to claim the use of face coverings and plain clothes “are aimed at protecting the culprits for these massive violations on the rights of the entire population.”
“People who are nakedly violating the law are generally the ones who are trying to hide their identities. It’s quite revealing that ICE and DHS are engaging in this de facto policy now,” Lee opined.
President Donald Trump has called some of the students who have been detained “terrorist sympathizers” and said they are not welcome here.
Attorneys for the detained students are working to get their clients released while the federal government argues over which courts should have jurisdiction in the cases, including Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, who were taken by authorities to a facility in Louisiana.
Critics warn the masked federal officers could become standard procedure
Sandweg, the former director of ICE, said the face coverings are a “byproduct of this administration’s policies.”
“There is this credible harassment threat, so I’m just torn on this because I hate these images. It’s so not ideal in any way, shape or form. But these officers are doing their jobs,” he said.
He continued: “The number one rule of any law enforcement agency is the safety and security of the individual officers.”
Face coverings weren’t a topic of discussion in the years Sandweg worked closely with ICE in the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, he says but there should be a policy on wearing masks, he added.
“In the rare times they’re wearing masks, it’s because of very specific threat streams, like they’re taking down a high-level cartel member and there might be actual threats to their physical safety,” said Sandweg.
As the Trump administration continues to roll out policies targeting immigrants, experts and immigration attorneys caution the likelihood of more officers following suit and creating a new standard.
Hassan Ahmad, an attorney for Khan Suri, said the circumstances of his detention were “shocking and disgraceful.”
“It should worry everyone that masked government agents can disappear someone from their home and family because the current administration dislikes their opinion,” Ahmad said.
There are times when officers wearing face coverings makes sense, according to Miller, who offered the example of an undercover operative. “But having the entire arrest team, as they approach the person, pull masks up is a new wrinkle,” he said.
Both Miller and Sandweg say a policy dictating mask use for officers should be in place at the federal level.
“When you start a practice and you have a policy, all you have to do is follow that policy,” Miller said. “But when you start a practice without a policy and start going too far, usually somebody ends up fixing it for you.”
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