A man lies pinned in the middle of the road, groaning in pain. He’s surrounded by men in tactical gear marked “Police,” their faces covered by masks and dark sunglasses. One officer punches him repeatedly in the head.
Outside a courthouse in San Antonio, a woman and her 3-year-old son are led away by men in plainclothes with their faces obscured. Her husband calls out, “My wife, my son,” in Spanish.
These scenes have been captured in various videos posted online by firsthand witnesses of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration across several U.S. cities.
The arrests follow a pattern: masked agents, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal officers assigned to work with ICE, wearing plainclothes and sometimes arriving in unmarked vehicles. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told NPR that agents are covering their faces to protect themselves from doxing and increasing threats. But civil rights groups and legal advocates say it’s creating fear and undermining public trust.
“It may well be a reason for masking if you are engaged in a clandestine operation against an organized drug ring or a well-armed gang of some sort,” said Stephen Kass, a member of the New York City Bar Association, which last month criticized agents for obscuring their identities through masking. “But that’s not what’s happening here.”
Kass is referring to arrests like the one that Job Garcia witnessed at a Home Depot in Hollywood, Calif.
Garcia, a 37-year-old photographer and Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University, had just left the store when he saw men surround a box truck with a Latino man in the driver’s seat. Some wore vests that read “POLICE — U.S. BORDER PATROL,” and their faces were covered.