Today, Explained - Unmasking ICE

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

ICE agents are showing up to immigration raids masked. The Trump administration says it's for the protection of the agents, but how does it impact accountability? This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Miles Bryan with help from Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Gabrielle Berbey, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Residents surround federal and Border Patrol agents after an immigrant raid in Bell, CA. Photo by Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Way back in March, you might remember a Turkish graduate student at Tufts was approached on the street by ICE agents who took her away screaming. It was unsettling and it was made more so by the fact that those agents were wearing masks, which people pointed out was not normal. But it is normal now. We're seeing this more and more often. Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked about it in a Senate hearing last week, and she was kind of like,

oh, no kidding, they're wearing masks. And Senator Peters, that's the first time that issue has come to me about them. You're saying that law enforcement officers, when they cover their faces. Right. But she recovered very quickly and she remembered something. They're being threatened, their families are being threatened.

Again, I get that, but they have to identify themselves as law enforcement. But they don't have to identify themselves, and they're not. And why that concern so many people is coming up on Today Explained. Support for this program comes from FM. Established nearly two centuries ago, FM is a leading mutual insurance company whose capital, scientific research capability and engineering expertise are solely dedicated to property risk management and the resilience of its policyholder owners.

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You've been writing about these videos that show masked agents grabbing people. Who are they? What is going on? Yeah. So who they are is almost definitionally unknown because they don't identify themselves, right? Yeah. There's no reason to think they're anyone but federal law enforcement. But one of the things we've seen in the second Trump administration is that a lot of other federal agencies have been looped into these enforcement actions. So we know that a lot of them are ICE, Immigration

to Customs Enforcement. We know too that there are other agencies that have been working with ICE. But the question of who the individuals are is an outstanding one. We don't know who a lot of these individuals are, which I think is important, right? I mean, it's not just that there are sort of a way things are done and it's not done that way anymore. What we're seeing is a fundamental shift in the compact between the public and law enforcement. And by shielding their identities, we lose an element of that accountability. Beyond just ICE and the Trump administration having no interest in being held to account

on this, these individuals, we don't know who they are. So when we see videos of them assaulting someone, for example, there's no way to adjudicate that. There's no way to say this person made these decisions because we don't know who these people are necessarily. And that's a significant shift as well. This is making people uncomfortable, I've noticed. Even people who are pro-deportation

of undocumented immigrants. ICE Director Todd Lyons has been asked about this and he recently said that... People are out there taking photos of the names, their faces, and posting them online with death threats to their family and themselves. So I'm sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I'm not going people are offended by them wearing masks, but I'm not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don't like what immigration enforcement is. So he's saying they're doing this because they have to. Does your reporting suggest

that ICE agents who are unmasked are facing threats? That is what he's saying. And he is also saying that there has been a 413 or more recently 500% increase in the number of assaults on ICE officers. And I think it's important to recognize, he's conflating three different things there. It is the case that people are trying to document who ICE is and where they are, so that immigrants can be attentive to the fact

that ICE may be in their neighborhoods. This is something that we've seen these sort of grassroots efforts to alert people to ICE may be in their neighborhoods. You know, this is something that we've seen in these sort of grassroots efforts to alert people to ICE's presence. There's a big gap between identifying where ICE is and who ICE officers are and issuing threats against them. There have been some examples of ICE officers facing threats.

When I first wrote about this in May, Lyons actually wrote a response in the Washington Post and he said, oh, well, look at this case in Texas where someone had made these threats against ICE. Now we are turning to a developing story. A North Texas man is now in custody and accused of threatening the head of Homeland Security along with ICE agents.

Federal officials say he also threatened several Republicans and even talked to the FBI to come and get him. So they did. What's interesting about that case, as I wrote last week, is that in that case, the I wrote last week, is that in that case, the person appears to have been responding to the fact that the ICE agents were masked. He was responding to the fact the ICE agents appeared to be acting without accountability. That's no excuse for issuing threats, certainly. But it's important context. But then we get to

this number, this 413% or 500%, or whatever they're saying it's now, they refused to give me any sort of rationalization for where those numbers came from. But when you consider those numbers, it makes sense, it's not good, but it makes sense that if you are engaged in a lot more enforcement actions and you're encountering people and trying to, you know, physically detain them, you're going to have more instances in which officers are being struck or assaulted. And we've seen that the definition of assault that's being used here is often very loose. The city controller of New York City, Brad Lander, faced potential charges of assault after he was arrested. And if you've seen the video of that encounter, it's very clear he wasn't assaulting anyone.

I'm not obstructing, I'm standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial office. But to conflate those incidents in which people who are being detained, and you know, there have been criminal charges filed for assault, but a lot of them are, for example, at ICE detention facilities where, you know, the ICE officers don't need to wear a mask because they're you know they're obviously ICE staff at an ICE detention facility but to conflate those assaults and that purported increase in assaults with threats and doxing or identification simply is not logically viable.

Is it legal for law enforcement to wear masks as they're doing? So this is, it's a fascinating question. And I think it's, people should recognize that it has long been the case that law enforcement is allowed to go undercover. We're all familiar with undercover cops, right? So there are circumstances in which people are allowed

to mask their identities. And I have not seen anything which suggests they are not allowed to do this by law. We've seen some efforts to try and actually create legislation that would mandate that they have their identities known. But none of that has passed yet. Obviously this is still fairly early on. So we have seen, however, some instances in which law enforcement officers who normally have standards

about self-identification have been seeing those standards change. So in Florida, for example, there's an email that went out to state troopers who are participating in raids alongside ICE. They were offered instructions that they did not have to maintain the standard, the uniform standard that they usually maintain that includes having their names, they were allowed to not display their names on their uniforms when engaged in operations with ICE. So we've seen some changes to standards that are aimed at anonymizing these individuals, which I think is a remarkable shift. What might accountability look like? How might it look different if we could see an agent's face and know who they worked for?

Well, it depends on what the agents are doing, right? You know, when I first reported on this, I spoke with Radley Balko, who's long done fantastic work in this accountability space, and he pointed to an example in which there had been a DEA action that targeted the wrong house. And there were two women that lived in the house that tried to get accountability from the DEA for that. But the DEA, because the agents were not identifiable in that instance, the DEA was able to keep shuffling

the cards and prevent them from being able to say, hey, you know, what happened here and get any accountability on their own accord. That's the challenge, right? It's not the case that we need to know who every single ICE officer is necessarily. It is that if something happens where there needs to be accountability,

there needs to be a mechanism for that accountability. And if people are shielding their identities, that mechanism becomes very, very difficult, particularly when you have the institution itself, ICE and the administration, very obviously unwilling to hold themselves to account in any way otherwise. Hmm. I wonder then if there's any evidence that being masked is changing the way that ICE agents are conducting arrests. No, it's a fair question.

And I think that it's very fair for Americans to assume that the understood lack of accountability, because obviously the officers are very aware that by being anonymous, that they have less accountability, whether or not that is leading to some of the heightened tensions that we've seen in these encounters. It may simply be the fact that because there are more encounters, we're seeing more of these incidents. But it's a very fair question to ask. Many of the downsides are predictable. If a person wears a mask, the accountability is lowered. Are there any unexpected downsides here though?

Anyone can put on tactical gear, say they're ICE, and go up to people and try and detain them. And we've seen instances of this. I knew at 430 a suspect in jail after police say he robbed a 29-year-old man while impersonating an ICE agent. Philadelphia police are looking for a man who they say dressed like a federal agent to commit a crime. Here he is caught on surveillance

as he walked into an auto repair shop right next to a police station. He apparently shouted immigration and then zip tied a woman who was working there and took off with about a thousand bucks in cash. And it's hard for people to know like, is this a nice officer that I have to listen to or is it not? And you know, I think everyone is worried about an occasion in which someone sees someone

approaching with a firearm and responds in kind. And you know, maybe that's a legitimate law enforcement officer, and maybe it isn't. But this is what we're setting ourselves up for if these people are not identifiable as law enforcement. And masking may be legal for the agents, but impersonating a federal law enforcement officer, is that a crime? Yeah, that's bad. Don't do that. Okay. If there are two messages, don't impersonate law enforcement and don't assault law enforcement. All right. So the Trump administration has a broad immigration strategy. How do massed

agents, how does mass law enforcement fit into that broad strategy? Well, I think the strategy broadly is they just want to have as many immigrants out of the country as they possibly can. We often qualify that by strategy? Well, I think the strategy broadly is they just want to have as many immigrants out of the country as they possibly can. We often qualify that by saying undocumented immigrants, but I don't think that holds anymore, right? We're seeing the revocation of temporary protected status for groups, people who came to the country legally, interpreters who worked with our troops in Afghanistan. People are now facing deportation who were not only not talked about on the campaign

trail, but who were presumed to be in the country, you know, by following the rules and in accordance with American law. So, in line with that, we are seeing that the people who are engaged in these deportation efforts are feeling completely unbound, right? That they feel as though they have been given a mandate to sweep up as many

people as they can. And there's reporting that suggests they very literally have quotas of who they're trying to target and that they are empowered to do that through any mechanism that they possibly can. And that's bad, that it is not good to have a law enforcement body in the United States, which feels as though it can act without account and sweep up as many people as possible, including citizens, including green card holders, including people who are here on legitimate visas. You know, we've seen lots of people get caught in this dragnet who by no definition deserve

to face any threat of deportation whatsoever. But that's the challenge. And that's something that has been made very real by the Trump administration. Philip Bump is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. Coming up next, a TV critic who started writing about those ICE videos and those bystander videos on what she thinks they tell us. Support for Today Explained comes from Vanta. If I could automate 90% of one task in my life, oh no, they are putting me on this spot.

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being a critic at Vulture is that you have a remit to cover basically anything that interests you, if you can get an editor interested as well. So I also like to think of myself as just a culture critic more broadly. So recently you talked to an editor into letting you write a piece about ice raid videos. Why did you think it was important to write about them? This is something that I started seeing on my social media feeds early this year. I know lots of people did. And in the beginning of the year, actually, it was one of the Vulture editors who had come to me and said, hey, have you noticed this kind of ICE propaganda thing

that seems to be taking over? It looks a lot like reality television. I'm a federal search warrant search for premises. So whoever that needs to be, I need to be able to pace that. I write a lot about reality TV. I think about it in a lot of different contexts. And so we were talking about the way that ICE and DHS had started producing these videos that

really capitalized on how Americans watch shows like Cops and Live PD. Doors opening. One person. OK. OK. What I want is that you leave. Keep walking towards me. Keep walking towards me. Keep going. Hey, hey.

Hey fellas. And over time, what I started to notice is that there are all of these bystander videos of ICE raids that are capturing exactly the same kind of events, but that look different, notably different from how ICE propaganda presents them. And so that became a much more interesting way of thinking about what it feels like to be an American on social media scrolling and encountering all of these videos. What is the difference that you picked up on? There are a lot of differences that are common. In most of the ICE videos, you can see the exact same thing that you would see if you were watching a bystander video.

You see guys getting out of a truck, and they go to collect someone, and they often handcuff them or zip tie them, and then lead them off into some kind of van. However, ICE videos have this sort of broad tonal range, right, like some of them are very straightforward, they look like news coverage, often they do repost local news footage of the ICE raids. An illegal alien from Guatemala

charged with raping a child in Massachusetts. An MS-13 gang member from El Salvador accused of murdering a Texas man. A Venezuelan charged with filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President Donald J. Trump's leadership. But then there will also be these ones

that are clearly trolling. Like they are meant to be shared by people who think that this is awesome and that this is funny. I'm conducting surveillance for a possible arrest this morning. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Get out right now. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

They will put the cops theme music under it. There's a video that was posted by DHS about a cartel party. And they're like, we'll bring ice next time, baby. And it's set to Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby. Ice Ice Baby. You know, it's memified. It's trolling. Obviously, bystander videos don't have any of that sort

of quality to them, because they are records of people being horrified. Where are you taking them? Where are you taking them? You have to tell us. You are kidnapping them. Tell us where you're taking them. You cannot do this. Tell us where! But there is this one really important difference that I have seen that holds true through all of the ICE propaganda, which is that they never post videos where there are people around standing on the streets looking at what's happening and protesting. Almost every bystander video, often it's the person who's filming themselves. You guys cannot take her.

Often it's other people who have like come out of houses or come out of businesses on the surrounding block will be standing there around all of these vehicles, around the ICE agents, and they'll be expressing how furious they are often with all kinds of terrible words and they are screaming and they are yelling and they're trying to block traffic. None of you are Native American. You all started out as immigrants. Remember that. Remember that. What part of Europe are you from? That's what never shows up in the ICE propaganda videos. I was watching a lot of these videos this afternoon, both the bystander and the official ones. And ICE clearly wants us, the official narrative clearly is, this is happening effortlessly.

But then, my gosh, some of these ones that are taken in the streets, you see the fight, you see the person pushed down on the hood of a car, you see the person's kids screaming, somebody's being dragged away, and notably the ICE agents have their faces covered. And you think, well, if it was effortless, y'all would not be wearing masks.

What do you take from the attempt to get us to think that this is really simple versus the reality? Yeah, they really seem invested in this image of deportation where the people who are being taken away are not complaining. They are not fighting it. They see in most ICE videos, people are led away very calmly. Nobody's weeping. It's not like there are people's family members surrounding them.

There aren't children crying. But there are plenty of other ICE videos where you can see their masks. You can see that this is how they come into spaces. There's one pretty significant raid that happened at the Glen Valley Foods facility in Omaha where the local news coverage, which was then reposted by ICE and by DHS, you can see, you can see all of their masks and you can see the the vests and you can see how inhuman and how terrifying, frankly, all of the ICE agents look. But you can also see what they would they show you in that footage that they reposted is like calm people walking in orderly lines out of this facility.

But there are bystander videos of that exact same event, and they begin much earlier. They begin with people in the lunchroom crying, calling their loved ones, shouting at the ICE agents. So there's a man who's sitting down in one of the bystander videos and an ICE agent says we have a warrant and the guy says, and like this is not something that ever shows up in the ICE propaganda because they don't want you to know they have no interest in displaying how angry people are about this.

What is the utility of those bystander videos? What are you seeing in them? I think there's a huge utility and I was really, I did not feel this at first. As I was watching more and more of these though, I was so taken with how many of the bystander videos actually don't show anything at all. Like it will be a guy in a car and he's driving down the block and he is spotted what are clearly ice trucks parked down the block. Hey, where's your fucking warrant?

Where's your warrant? No, fuck you. Give me your badge and your name. You guys have no warrant. No probable cause. Shame on you guys. Shame on you. And it's just people trying to say like, I don't know what this is, but I hate it and I need everyone to be with me on it. I think are also so powerful because it is so easy to watch how

effortless this kind of thing appears to be when ICE posts it, and to feel so powerless in response. And instead, when you watch all these bystander videos, you feel like, all right, this is at least here's a thing I can do. I can be mad about this. I can yell at those guys. Maybe I can try to block their traffic a little bit. I can tell other people about how I feel about it. And at least I will be less alone. try to block their traffic a little bit. I can tell other people about how I feel about it.

And at least I will be less alone, and we will all know that this is a thing that you are not alone in feeling, that this is how people are responding. And you can too. You had to watch a lot of these videos for your piece. Is there one of them that you're having trouble forgetting? There are a lot I've been having trouble forgetting. But the one that I really struck on and sort of became the end point of that essay

was a video that was not particularly popular yet, although it became much, much popular very shortly. And it was a bunch of roofers sitting up on a roof line. It was filmed by one of the roofers. And it's like a beautiful, brilliant day. He's in Lafayette, Louisiana. They're in the middle of building this roof. It's like in pieces around them. And you can see him astride the roof line. He's like way up in the sky. And he points the phone down and you can see ICE agents just waiting for them on the ground. And nothing happens in that video. There's no, we don't see the results of it. And you actually can go later onto his account and see later videos.

And what he says in the later videos is like, we were all okay. They didn't take any of us. But thank you all for worrying. Thank you and congratulations to everyone who is worried about us. We're all fine and we're going to return to the Halle because we have no choice. And that has really stuck with me. You can read Catherine Van Arindonk at Vulture. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi, Miles Bryan, and Peter Balanon-Rosen. It was edited by Amina El-Sadi, Andrea Christensdottir, and Patrick Boyd are our engineers, and Laura Bullard and Gabrielle Burbay check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Ring.

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