One of the defining images of President Trump’s second term so far has been security officers in masks. Whether detaining a Turkish student on the street in Boston, raiding Home Depot parking lots in Los Angeles or, now, arresting immigrants on the streets of the capital, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in tactical gear and with their faces obscured have become a strange new national pageant.
The Homeland Security Department says that in an era of extreme polarization and rising political violence, masks are necessary. “ICE officers wear a mask because they’ve been doxxed by the thousands,” Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, told my colleagues at “The Daily.” “Their families have been doxxed. ICE officers’ pictures show up on trees and telephone poles. Death threats are sky-high.” Masking, the argument goes, is simply the practical response.
Lawmakers in liberal states say the practice should be banned, and this summer, Democratic elected officials in California, New York and Pennsylvania proposed laws to do just that. At the end of July, Virginia’s Democratic senators introduced a bill to ban the use of masks nationally. The issue also got the attention of a federal judge, who, in a ruling on Tuesday against Mr. Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles, noted disapprovingly that the armed forces’ identity “was often obscured by protective armor.”
As I watched all of this, I found myself wondering about masking by law enforcement and whether it has a history in the United States. Something about it seemed at once familiar and foreign. That’s because I associate the practice with Russia.
In the summer of 2000, when President Vladimir Putin had just taken office, I was living in Moscow and working as a reporter. At the time, the first battle lines were being drawn between the new president and the powerful oligarchs he hoped to tame. Russians began to see raids by government forces on oligarchs and their properties. Men in masks conducted them. They became so ubiquitous that people began referring to them sardonically as Maski Show, or mask shows, after a popular television show involving mask-wearing clowns.
The United States is not Russia. But as I search for ways to understand what is happening in my country today, I am looking to the places I’ve been before. In Russia in the 2000s, I thought of masking as a peculiar feature of a wobbly post-Soviet state. Over time it became clear that it was a harbinger of a new era.
The Power and the Danger
Masks became a feature of America’s fiercely polarized political life during the Covid pandemic. Mask requirements enraged conservatives, who saw them as an effort by the government to boss them around on flimsy science. Concerns about the virus’s spread subsided, but the debate seemed to have unlocked something in the American psyche about the power — and danger — of masks.
Over the past several years, states and counties began passing laws against masking that applied to protesters in demonstrations, reasoning that they would be more likely to do something illegal if law enforcement couldn’t see their faces.
Some of those laws echoed statutes passed in the 1940s and 1950s by states and cities that were trying to control the Ku Klux Klan, said Robert Mickey, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Even though Klan chapters were often “shot through with members of the police,” Mr. Mickey said, those officers, who showed their faces during the day, wore masks when doing the work of the Klan at night.
There are good reasons vigilantes wear masks and police officers don’t. Policing experts argue that masking by law enforcement is wrong because officers are public servants and are supposed to be accountable to the public. Hiding behind a mask makes that harder. Yes, officers’ jobs can be dangerous, but being publicly identifiable goes along with having the right to wield a deadly weapon on behalf of the state.
In recent years in the United States, trends in law enforcement were moving in the opposite direction. Many police departments now use body cameras and require that the officer’s badge, with name and number, be visible.
Michael German, a retired F.B.I. agent who is now a fellow in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said that even when he worked undercover, “the period of secrecy ended when charges were brought and I had to defend what I had done in that undercover capacity.”
Masking provides leeway for abuse, he said. People tend to be more scrupulous and vigilant when they can be personally held accountable for their actions. A mask allows more latitude for sloppiness or shortcuts — a punch or a kick, for example.
No one I interviewed could think of an example of American law enforcement masking. Jules Epstein, a law professor at Temple University who worked for decades as a criminal defense lawyer and death penalty litigator, said that in his more than 45 years of practice, he had never seen the police wear masks, including in high-profile gang cases.
‘Without Question a Bad Sign’
Outside the United States, masking by law enforcement has a long history. When it happens, it tends to be in countries with weak central governments, sometimes ones that are fighting insurgencies or drug cartels or, for that matter, political opponents.
In Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, the government worked with paramilitary groups — forces on the side of the government but not directly employed by it — that often wore masks. They operated at the margins of the law, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, and over time, courts and special tribunals have documented abuses they perpetrated. In Colombia, the state was up against a well-equipped and deadly foe: drug cartels. Anyone obstructing them had reason to fear for their lives. Judges wore masks to avoid reprisal killings, a practice that became known as “judges without faces.”
Law enforcement officers in Mexico sometimes mask, too, Mr. Isacson said, in areas where drug cartels have a strong presence.
In Peru, government forces often wore masks in their war against Shining Path guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist who has studied Latin America and written about democratic decline. In areas where Shining Path was strongest, police officers were afraid of reprisals by the guerrillas but also of becoming pariahs in their own communities for abuses they themselves committed, he said.
More recently, Human Rights Watch has documented cases of government forces using masks in Venezuela during the repression that followed the country’s tainted presidential election last year. And in the Philippines, victims of Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign report that the people doing the killing were sometimes masked.
“The use of masks,” Mr. Levitsky said, “is without question a bad sign.”
And it is extremely rare in functional democracies. “I cannot think of a democratic country with a reliable rule of law where security forces mask themselves,” Mr. Levitsky said. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Stronger, more confident regimes rarely mask. Totalitarian states that have established control over their populations tend to avoid moves that would stir dissent. Masking can draw attention to the fact that the government is up to something it wants to hide, or that it is not powerful enough to protect its own forces. In short, it’s a bad look.
In China, the security forces do not wear masks, said Lynette Ong, a China scholar and professor at the University of Toronto. But something else happens. In her book, “Outsourcing Repression,” Ms. Ong explains that China’s everyday security policing force draws from ordinary people mobilized from the street and paid a daily rate or hired on a contract. The state does not formally employ them, and when they are caught harming someone, the government can plausibly say it was not responsible. China may be authoritarian, she said, but public officials can be held accountable for abuse. They can be fired, for example, if their forces are caught on camera beating people up.
Masks are rare in Iran, too, though they are occasionally used in drug and organized crime operations, said Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who is now an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based organization focused on U.S. policy in the Middle East. He said that when he was arrested in 2005, no one, not even his interrogators, wore masks.
“The people who interrogated me, they wanted me to see their faces,” Mr. Memarian said.
The reason was that the government wanted to show that what it was doing was legitimate. They also arrested him discreetly, “without a splash,” Mr. Memarian said. A number of armed men came to his building, but his neighbors had no idea it was happening. They kept it low-key so as not to draw the attention of regime critics.
“Once a mask is involved,” he said, “people understand it as a sign of weakness, that the government has something to hide.”
The Show
In Russia in the early 2000s, Mr. Putin wasn’t trying to hide anything. On the contrary: He was putting on a show that he wanted everyone to see. Russia’s central government had been plagued by weakness throughout the 1990s, with the oligarchs running official agencies and having their way with the state. The Maski Shows were efforts by this new leader to turn the tables.
One of the most famous episodes took place a few days after Mr. Putin was inaugurated in May 2000. Armed men in military fatigues and masks showed up at one of the offices that belonged to the oligarch who had founded the first independent television network, NTV.
Yevgeny Kiselyov, then the director of the channel and its main anchor, remembers being struck by the over-the-top nature of the force. “They were carrying out their operation as if this building was full of heavily armed terrorists,” he said in an interview. In reality, it was middle-aged women working in accounting.
The television station was eventually taken over by the state, and Mr. Kiselyov now lives outside Russia. He said the meaning of the raid was clear even then. It was a public message, not just to that station and its owner, but to anyone who opposed Mr. Putin. “It was an act of intimidation,” he said. “It was saying, ‘We are now in power, and we are going after you.’”
The Trump administration seems to be sending the same message with ICE, except in this case, the targets are not oligarchs, but immigrants and the businesses who employ them.
But there are other audiences. Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, who helped oversee border security in the George W. Bush administration, said he believes the performance is aimed at would-be migrants around the world. Former President Joe Biden, “no matter what he did, could not change the view of the world that the border was open,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “I knew it was going to take someone who was going to create some heartache, and that they’d have to be very tough and create some fear to change the circumstances.”
And then there’s the domestic audience. Polling suggests that many Americans don’t like Mr. Trump’s tactics around deportations, at least when it comes to immigrants who have not committed violent crimes. But some Americans do approve of it, perhaps drawn to its dark spectacle. The immigrant detention center in Florida known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is now tied up in court battles, has its own merch. Americans pose for selfies by the center’s new highway sign and post them on social media. In early August, Indiana announced a partnership with the Homeland Security Department to build the “Speedway Slammer,” its answer to Alligator Alcatraz. A few weeks later, Nebraska announced plans for the “Cornhusker Clink.”
Mr. Levitsky called the highly visible, almost ostentatious use of masks “a performance but with real-world consequences.” “MAGA seems to get something out of playing authoritarian,” he said. “There’s an element of cosplay to it.”
Perhaps the most important audience of all is the agency itself — and its potential recruits. ICE says it wants to hire 10,000 new agents at a time when hiring law enforcement officers has been hard. It got a multibillion-dollar cash infusion from Congress in July. Masking could serve to reassure reluctant applicants, who are worried for their safety or about being judged by people they know, but also to attract more exuberant ones, who see masking as subversive and fun.
In August, the Homeland Security Department posted on social media an image in the style of the TV show “South Park” that showed a caravan of cartoon figures riding in ICE cars. Their faces were all covered from the nose down. At the top of the post was a link: JOIN.ICE.GOV.
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