ICE agents using masks

[mister_coffee]

In the next few weeks DHS is going to run out of money and need to come back to Congress for a supplemental appropriation. Supplemental appropriations are subject to filibuster.

It is obvious what Senate Democrats have to do.

[Rideback]

Yes, and with the groups that tirelessly ran facial rec on the J6ers to assist FBI in identifying people one would have to assume that group is well on their way to using the same technology to ID ICE agents whose masks slipped. It will be interesting to see the numbers some day of just how many new recruits Kristi Noem oversaw in her tenure.

[mister_coffee]

The logical endpoint of this policy is going to get both members of the public and law enforcement officers killed. For no justifiable reason.

The only way this makes sense is if there are people now working for ICE that the administration does not want the public to know are working for ICE.

[Rideback]

Parsing ICE's Mixed Up, Hard-To-Believe Assault Claims by Philip Bump of the Washington Post

"Last month, I wrote a column questioning why Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were increasingly disguising their identities as they conducted sweeps and arrests. One obvious answer was that they hoped to avoid accountability for their actions, making it harder to say precisely who had plucked up a college student or local mother and sent them to jail in another state pending deportation.

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The acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, took the time to respond to my column in a letter to this newspaper. He lamented my allegedly having disparaged his officers during National Police Week, insisting that officers were covering their faces for their own safety. He noted that a man in Texas faced criminal charges for threatening ICE officers and claimed that “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
Given that it is no longer National Police Week, I assume Mr. Lyons will have no objection to my digging into his claims a bit more robustly.

The trigger for doing so is the arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on Tuesday. Lander, as you have likely heard, was detained outside a New York courtroom as he pressed immigration officers to present an arrest warrant for a man they were taking into custody. Video from the scene shows Lander attempting to stay in physical contact with the immigrant being detained until the officers forcibly took him into custody.

Lander’s effort to prevent the immigrant from being detained opened him up to criminal charges centered on obstruction. In a social media post, though, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Lander would also be charged with “assaulting law enforcement.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) later announced that the charges had been dropped. But a review of the video of the incident makes it hard to imagine why assault charges were even on the table. Lander — literally and aesthetically the city’s accountant — assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist. If similar charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-New Jersey) were dubious, the ones against Lander are simply silly.

It raises an obvious question, given Lyons’s assertions: What constitutes an “assault” warranting blanket anonymity for his organization’s employees?

I emailed ICE multiple times asking where the 413 percent claim came from and whether there were news reports about the assaults it was tallying. I got no response, so I endeavored to figure out where the figures came from myself.

We should begin by noting that the 413 percent figure — mentioned in a DHS social media post about Lander on Tuesday — has been deployed by DHS since early May. In a post from mid-April, the figure was 300 percent, suggesting that some recalculation had been undertaken. If that’s the case, though, either the number of assaults since early May has been steady or DHS hasn’t bothered to update the figure even as their officers have been deployed much more broadly in an effort to increase immigrant arrests.

That ICE uses a percentage is telling. A 413 percent increase could mean that the number of assaults went from 200 in 2024 to 1,026 in 2025 — or that it went from eight to 41. I hasten to say that, of course, assaulting anyone, including law enforcement officers, is unacceptable. But there’s a big difference between an increase of 826 assaults and an increase of 33 — especially if some of those “assaults” are of the Lander variety.

Here I will point out that Customs and Border Protection offers monthly data on the number of assaults on its officers. The year-to-date total is 20 percent lower than it was in 2024.


I was able to find Justice Department and DHS news releases documenting a number of assaults against ICE officers since January — assaults targeting 12 individuals. Five of them were targeted at ICE facilities in California and Texas. An ICE news release also mentioned assaults during a sweep in Nebraska, though the announcement blurred accusations of “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” It also didn’t include a total number of officers targeted.
For context, ICE announced in April that it had conducted 66,463 arrests since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

Importantly, most of the assaults documented with indictments or news releases occurred as immigrants were being detained. One officer was elbowed in the face; two others were injured when a target’s vehicle struck their own as he was trying to escape. Considered along with the assaults that occurred at ICE facilities, you will notice a pattern: Officers hiding their identities wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the assaults from occurring.

In fact, one Justice Department assault announcement specifically noted that arresting officers were “in clearly marked ICE/Police body armor, while in front of a law enforcement vehicle with emergency lights flashing.” In other words, that the officers were clearly identifiable as such is used to reinforce that the suspect knew he was assaulting law enforcement. This is mentioned because it bolsters the government’s position.

ICE didn’t provide me with any examples of immigration officers being identified, targeted and assaulted outside of the context of an arrest. So let’s consider the example used by Lyons in his response to my May column.

Ray King was arrested this year for allegedly posting threats against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and ICE agents on social media. He didn’t act on any such threats, thankfully. But the timeline is important here. King’s threats were allegedly made in late March, after immigration officers had begun covering their faces with masks.

My May column about ICE officers obscuring their identities began by considering the arrest in late March of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, an arrest in which some officers wore masks and weren’t visibly identifiable. King’s alleged threats came days later and referenced ICE being “a secret police force” — a descriptor that’s become common as more attention has been paid to how officers are seeking to obscure their identities.

Again, no assault on law enforcement is warranted nor are threats against law enforcement. It is also undoubtedly the case that there have been assaults against immigration officers that have not been publicly reported or where criminal charges are pending.

That said, we should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. That the organization would not provide evidence for its claims, that it has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators and that it conflates assaults of officers engaged in official acts with putative threats to them personally all diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt.

Leaving the question I posed in May: Why are these officers covering their faces if not to avoid accountability?"