Trump's Masked Goons are a Criminal's Dream

America spent two centuries learning that law enforcement should show its face. Now we're watching the consequences of ignoring that lesson…

It was January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the White House promising the largest mass deportation operation in American history, when a hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!”

The man raised his hands. He thought he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol-whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches and four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant’s terrified parents.

They weren’t ICE. They weren’t police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump’s America, all you need to terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout.

NBC News and Noticias Telemundo just published a sweeping investigation documenting how that Greensboro robbery was not an isolated horror. Reviewing court records, police reports, and news accounts from across the country, they found 31 separate cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crimes, up from an average of just five per year over the previous decade.

That’s a 484 percent increase in a single year.

In New York, a Dominican woman was dragged into a basement, beaten, and raped by a man claiming to be an immigration agent. In North Carolina, another woman was raped at her workplace by a fake agent. In Philadelphia, an armed man claiming to be ICE and wearing a vest marked “Security Enforcement Agent” zip-tied a fifty-year-old Dominican cashier and robbed his business.

The FBI quietly warned in an internal bulletin last October that this was happening, but the administration’s response has been to keep keep the bulletin on the QT while telling ICE agents to stay masked up.

My home state of Oregon, at least, is doing something about it. On Wednesday of last week, the Portland City Council voted 8-4 to bar law enforcement officers from wearing face coverings within the city and to require them to display clear identification.

“Secret police have no place in a democracy,” Councilor Sameer Kanal said, and he’s exactly right: The principle Portland is trying to defend is older than the republic itself.

Walk through any small-town museum in America and you’ll find them in the glass cases: the brass shield, the polished star, the patrolman’s cap with its leather brim. From the moment we started building professional police forces in this country back in the 1830s, the entire visual grammar of American law enforcement was built around one simple democratic idea, which is that the cop should look like a cop and everybody should know who he is.

The badge had a number on it. The uniform was distinctive. The face was visible. Walk up to an officer on the street and you knew, instantly, who he was, what agency he answered to, and how to file a complaint if he stepped out of line.

That wasn’t an accident of fashion. It was the bedrock principle of policing in a free society, the visible difference between an officer of the law and a thug with a gun, the visible difference between an American cop respecting the Constitution and one of Putin’s masked thugs as you can see here from NBC.

It’s probably where Trump got the idea; Russia is the only other developed country in the world that has this practice and Putin telephones with him regularly to offer advice.

Throughout American history, the people who hid their faces were always the bad guys. They were the highwaymen and the bank robbers, the lynch mobs and the bootleggers’ enforcers, and most infamously the Ku Klux Klan, whose white hoods became such a national disgrace that between roughly 1920 and 1960, at least 18 states passed anti-mask laws specifically to strip the Klan of its anonymity.

Alabama did it. Florida did it. Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, all of them. And the conservative segregationist governors of the Jim Crow South didn’t pass those laws because they suddenly loved Black Americans.

They passed them, as the ACLU has documented, because the Klan’s masked terrorism was making their states look like banana republics, and because they understood, even in their racism, that lawful authority requires a visible face. New York had gotten there a century earlier, making it a crime back in 1845 for anyone, including law enforcement, to appear “disguised and armed” in public.

The logic was so obvious that for the better part of two hundred years nobody seriously challenged it. If you’ve got a badge, gun, and the authority of the state to drag a human being away from his family, you damn well better be willing to show your face while you do it.

That’s the price of the power one gets with a badge and the ability to inflict violence, imprisonment, and even death on others. When you hide your identity, we believed, you’re not enforcing the law, you’re committing a crime under cover of it.

Then came Trump’s lawless ICE thugs, now with a budget bigger than the US Marine Corps, and hundreds of concentration camps today holding more people (~70,000) than Hitler had a year into his administration (~40,000).

I wrote back in October of last year about how Donald Trump’s masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement raiders bear a disturbing resemblance to the Klan of a century ago, complete with the legal arguments their handlers make in court about the agents’ “right to anonymity” being identical to the arguments Klansmen made when states finally cracked down on their hoods.

What I didn’t fully appreciate then is how quickly the rest of my prediction — that criminals would soon be imitating ICE in order to facilitate their crimes — would come true.

Once the federal government normalizes masked, anonymous men in tactical gear kicking down doors and snatching people off the street, every two-bit predator in America with a black ski mask and a fake badge realizes he’s been handed a license to rob, rape, and terrorize with near-total impunity.

The immigrant victims, of course, typically don’t report any of it, because they’re terrified that if they walk into a police station the cop behind the desk will just call ICE on them. The criminals know this; they’re counting on it, in fact.

As Naureen Shah of the ACLU put it, we have never in this country experienced the terrorism of masked agents on this kind of scale, and we have never before experienced this problem of people being able to credibly pose as federal law enforcement, because the entire system was designed for two centuries to make sure it could never happen.

Portland’s new ordinance, sponsored by Councilor Kanal and co-sponsored by Councilors Elana Pirtle-Guiney and Angelita Morillo, directs the Portland Police Bureau to investigate anybody who’s acting like a cop, detaining a member of the public the way an officer would, or refuses to show credentials.

It won’t, by itself, unmask federal ICE agents, because the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause puts federal officers beyond direct city regulation, and Kanal was honest about that limit on the floor. But it’s a clear statement of principle, and it joins similar legislation passed by the Philadelphia City Council last year, along with California’s No Secret Police Act, authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and signed by Governor Newsom last fall.

The Ninth Circuit has temporarily blocked enforcement of the California law against masked federal agents, an obscenity of a ruling that effectively says the federal government has a constitutional right to deploy hooded paramilitaries in cities that don’t want them.

The Founders, who’d just fought a revolution against George III’s customs men and faceless Press Gangs who’d kidnap (impressment) colonists to take to sea as free labor, would have recognized exactly what’s happening here.

They wrote the Fourth Amendment in part because of it. James Madison would have understood, instinctively, that an armed agent of the state who refuses to show his face is not enforcing the law but undermining it, because the entire premise of self-government is that the people get to see who is doing what to them and demand accountability through their elected representatives.

Hide the face and you cut that wire. You turn cops into the very thing the badge was invented to distinguish them from.

ICE is masked, in other words, for exactly the reason the Klan was masked, and exactly the reason so many common criminals and bank robbers throughout American history have been masked.

These ICE thugs know that much of what they’re doing is either flatly illegal under our Constitution and our treaty obligations, or so morally rotten that the agents themselves would be ostracized from any decent community if their neighbors and relatives saw the videos.

They’re hiding because they have something to hide. And the predictable second-order consequence, the wave of fake ICE agents now robbing and raping immigrant women across America, is a feature of the system the Trump administration built, not a bug.

Call your senators and representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want federal legislation requiring every law enforcement officer in the country — federal, state, or local — to operate with a visible face and a readable badge number except in genuine undercover operations approved by a judge.

If your city or state hasn’t passed an ordinance like Portland’s, call your mayor and your state legislators and tell them it’s time. Find your state lawmakers at openstates.org and make sure you’re registered to vote at vote.org so next November you can help throw out the politicians who keep voting to fund this masked terror.

America has spent over two centuries figuring out, through bitter experience, that hooded men with guns are not law enforcement. We can’t forget that lesson now.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “Who are the Men Behind the Masks?”

Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:

We Are All Scott Pelley

The problem is money. Of the approx 900 Billionaires, only three are Democrats, Gates,Bloomberg and Buffet, and those three aren’t liberal, just Democrats. And none of those own or even try to own any media.
~ Willian Farrar

I love the song! Thank you Louise! Truth to power, thank you Thom for all you do! Following you for many years and I’m so glad to have your voice during these awful Trump years! Stay well!
~ Susan Muscatell

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