Among the earliest signs that the second Trump administration might be precipitously different from the first were the masks. Almost the first thought I had, in watching videos of federal agents snatching campus protesters and opinion writers, among many others seized somewhat violently on camera this year, was about what looked like a new anonymity protocol. There were agents wearing masks and others without visible name tags or badges, many operating in plain clothes. Why were so many of these agents trying to hide their identities?
“ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” a federal judge, William Young, wrote in a blistering 161-page First Amendment ruling handed down last week. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” he continued. The judge, a Reagan appointee, compared immigration agents to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and declared that federal efforts to deport outspoken protesters amounted to a “full-throated assault” on freedom of speech. “Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”
Is this a true secret police? The term is darkly tempting, though much of what we’ve observed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection this year has fallen distressingly within the bounds of our brutally capacious immigration law. The National Guard deployments, too, have unfolded in public view. The terroristic sweep of President Trump’s mass deportation program will be repeatedly litigated in the years to come, in courts of both law and public opinion — U.S. citizens arrested by agents apparently uninterested in their immigration status, agents drawing guns on civilian bystanders. And to the extent that many of those officers and their superiors have been not just enforcing laws and executive orders but also engaging in a kind of conspicuous and public cosplay, the costumes they have chosen are those of the enforcement arm of an authoritarian regime. When the masks came on, the mask came off.
The cosplay is now bleeding into state violence, and even for those used to pointing fingers and calling out authoritarianism, the past week has been a precipitous escalation: Trump speaking of the “enemy from within” as a national defense strategy waiting for approval proposes focusing the military on domestic threats and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, compares political opposition to terrorism; a military-style raid on a Chicago apartment complex; local police officers hit with tear gas from ICE agents.
The footage continued through the weekend, much of it horrifying. But at least we saw it.
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Last Friday, the 48-year-old Emmy-winning reporter Mario Guevara was deported to El Salvador from an ICE detention facility in Folkston, Ga. He was held in detention there for over 100 days. The state’s filings concerning his detention seem to largely focus on the crime of committing journalism.
Guevara was arrested in June at a No Kings rally outside Atlanta, where, while filming the protest for his livestreaming platform MG News, he (clearly wearing a press vest and keeping his distance from both protesters and law enforcement) briefly stepped into a roadway. Within days, the charges against him were dropped. But instead of being released, he was transferred to ICE custody. And although an immigration judge granted him bond, finding him neither dangerous nor a flight risk, the government appealed it, arguing that his recording of law enforcement activity itself constituted a danger. And so Guevara — whose work primarily documents immigration enforcement actions, which he often livestreams to hundreds of thousands of followers — was kept in ICE detention. Meanwhile, his immigration case was reopened, and eventually deportation proceedings commenced.
When the Columbia activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was detained in March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Khalil’s participation in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to a deportable threat to American foreign policy. The administration appeared to offer a similar argument about Rumeysa Ozturk — seemingly confirming that she had been detained for activism, namely by being a writer of a campus opinion piece criticizing her university for its response to Israel’s war in Gaza, and that she should be deported for that speech crime.
Both of those First Amendment cases still hang in a kind of judicial limbo, though Khalil and Ozturk are — for now, at least — free. Guevara is not, having been sent from the country in which he raised a family and built a news organization for years back to the one he left fearing persecution for his reporting in 2004. “It’s a real frontal attack on journalism and freedom of the press,” said Jose Zamora of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I think it also shows you how all these democratic institutions that take hundreds of years to build can be dismantled in a year.”
The immigration side of Guevara’s case is complicated. Technically, authorities are given broad discretion in deciding deportation cases. By contrast, the detention that enabled those deportation proceedings to begin again is not complicated. “There’s no real crime here. It’s just pretext,” said Adam Rose, the press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club and the deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “That was totally in retaliation for his reporting,” said the A.C.L.U’s Scarlet Kim, one of Guevara’s lawyers in his recent proceedings. “The government has made that explicitly clear.”
Over the past six months, federal officials have again and again declared that documenting immigration enforcement activities by ICE agents is, by definition, a form of doxxing, which they describe not only as a form of harassment or even effectively an incitement to violence but also as the equivalent of violence. Such activity, they promised, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Last month federal prosecutors made good on the threat, issuing an indictment against three activists for doxxing ICE agents in August.
Students of political theory sometimes define the state as the entity that exercises a monopoly on violence; under Trump, the state seems to want to claim a monopoly on anonymity, too. Rose called the logic Orwellian. “It’s almost like doublespeak to say that filming is violence,” he said. “That is absurd. What filming does isn’t violence. It documents violence. It actually proves what really happened.”
Of course, there has been real violence against journalists since Trump returned to office, as well, not just arguments about whether Jimmy Kimmel should be on the air. During the protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles this June, more than 30 incidents of police violence against members of the media were documented by the Los Angeles Press Club, which last month won a remarkable injunction in a Federal District Court in California, in which the judge, Hernán Vera, had to detail that law enforcement could not attack or assault members of the press just for documenting a raid or protest. Vera described the attacks during the protests as “savagery.”
And in recent weeks, the violence has seemed to enter a new phase or perhaps merely a more visible one. On Sept. 28 an ICE agent fired a pepper ball at the car of a television journalist surveying a detention facility for signs of protest, of which there were none. On Sept. 30 at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, ICE agents shoved journalists to the floor, sending one to the hospital, just a week after a similar episode at the same facility led to the suspension of one agent — and only briefly.
And last Thursday in Portland, Ore., the conservative journalist Nick Sortor was arrested while documenting a protest against ICE — producing an immediate wave of right-wing outrage and, reportedly, a promise by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, that her department would surge resources to the city. Elsewhere in the city, ICE agents pepper-sprayed a woman who seemed to be filming them on her phone. In Chicago, ICE agents were accused of making bogus calls to the police, saying that people were tampering with a detention facility’s gate. (Police officers quickly determined the people were there only to observe.) A Chicago City Council member was arrested after asking whether the agents had a warrant for someone they’d detained. “If arresting an elected official for peacefully asking questions isn’t a demonstration of authoritarianism, then what is?” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois asked. “They seem to feel they can just willy-nilly shoot tear gas canisters at people and shoot them with foam rounds that can permanently maim people,” said Rose. “They’ve done this over and over.”
To a degree, the pattern follows a global trend. The U.N. has been warning about increasing violence and hostility toward the press for many years, with killings of journalists up 38 percent in 2022 and 2023 from the two previous years. More than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict there — a figure much higher than in previous wars — making it, the Committee to Protect Journalists said, “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists” that the organization had ever documented. What makes this even more remarkable is that Israel has largely blocked foreign reporters from entering Gaza since the conflict began.
It also reflects an increasing porousness about the term “journalist” and what we even mean by it in 2025, when almost anyone holding a phone can claim to be doing journalism, including many of those superficially indistinguishable from protesters (who, it pains me to have to say, should enjoy robust First Amendment protections in the United States, too). That porousness also means that category distinctions can be made pretty arbitrary — not just between observers and activists but also between the groups the online right likes to distinguish, citing Carl Schmitt, as friend and enemy. “There is an authoritarian playbook, and it has different steps,” said Zamora. “And it has started happening here in a very fast way.”
At various points over the past decade, nervous Americans sometimes told themselves certain calming stories about the threat of Trumpism — that liberal hysteria was a bigger threat to democracy, that the lesson of his first term was that incompetence stymied ideology, that popularity would be a check and that the courts would be trusted to ultimately hold.
ICE’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year is now set to roughly triple from the year before, as is its number of deportation officers, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, does not appear inclined to defer to surveys of public opinion when it comes to deportations and border enforcement. Democrats have come a long way since “Abolish ICE,” too, with many pivoting pretty hard on immigration in recent years.
In certain moments from certain vantages, the proceedings can look like incompetence, with all the Sturm und Drang of Trump’s policies producing far fewer than his desired one million deportations and a high-profile monthlong operation in Chicago yielding just more than 1,000 arrests. On social media, it can even look like farce — someone flinging a Subway sandwich at Customs and Border Protection officers in D.C., someone else cursing the president and then scooting off on his bike as Border Patrol agents chased on foot in downtown Chicago, a crowd surrounding and shaming two agents as they wrestled a man to the ground on the South Side, eventually getting them to flee.
But these are not the clips we are meant to see. For that, we have a beautiful, high-production-value hype video full of portentous music, documenting an apartment raid, that Noem posted to social media over the weekend. “Chicago, we’re here for you,” she wrote.
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