If masks are wrong for student protesters, they are usually wrong for ICE agents.
The Trump administration deems it wrong for anti-Israel student protesters to wear masks in order to shield their identity. The administration is right. Among those who would agree would be Martin Luther King, Jr., who conceived of civil disobedience as a moral posture requiring the courage to face the consequences. There is no moral statement if the person engaging in protest is masked.
The anti-Israel protesters want it both ways. They want the right to speak (disrupt) and also want the right not to be identified for their speech and illegal behavior. This is not civil disobedience. This is hypocrisy.
The Trump administration calls them out and rightly threatens penalties against universities that do not forbid protesters from wearing masks.
This is not a complicated question, morally, politically or constitutionally.
On these grounds, the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE personnel, some of whom are masked as they take purported illegal aliens, is wrong, since, in the current campaign, ICE is not detaining violent people. Police may mask themselves when arresting violent offenders, but visa offenders are rarely violent.
Quite apart from the question as to whether all of ICE’s deportations are justified — to which we shall return at another time — masked ICE agents constitute hypocrisy by the government. It, too, has no right to hide what’s it’s doing other than when it needs to protect itself against violence.
Still more: Just as student protesters who find it necessary to mask themselves cast doubt on the legitimacy of their position, ICE agents who unnecessarily mask themselves cast doubt on the legitimacy of their arrests.
The fact that some ICE personnel needlessly mask themselves undermines their policy, no less than the protesters who mask themselves undermine their point. If it is wrong to hide, it is wrong on all sides. If it is wrong for protesters who break the law to hide from law enforcement, it is wrong for law enforcement to hide as they enforce the law.
It is not only the accused person who has the right to know who is arresting him, but so does everyone else in society. We are not a society of secret trials and secret police. The taking of a suspected illegal immigrant is, in virtually every case, not a question of stopping a violent crime. It goes against the grain of the Constitution and the ethos of American democracy for law enforcement to hide its face as it carries out its duties.
It is also wrong for ICE agents not to identify themselves as they carry out their duties. Questions of whom to deport, when to deport and how to deport are complicated (as we say, for another time). But the question of masking is not complicated. It smacks of a police state more than of the United States of America.
The fact that some ICE agents mask themselves calls into question the government deportation policy. What is there to hide if everything being done is above board?
© IJN 2025
