California Got This One Right: ICE Agents Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Wear Masks

Like all authoritarian movements, MAGA likes to display “shock and awe” to arouse its supporters and intimidate its opponents. Why else would, say, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attend high-profile ICE raids—and then post videos of them on her social-media accounts?  It’s all for show.

Likewise, responsible political movements are embarrassed by hypocrisy, but MAGA displays it as a loyalty test. Vice President J.D. Vance berated the Brits for detaining people over social media posts, then called on Americans to report people to their employers for negative posts about Charlie Kirk. And Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to crack down on “hate speech,” even though Republicans have long viewed such laws as speech controls. They know what message this sends.

The most iconic image of the administration, however, isn’t an official in SWAT gear or an oleaginous Vance espousing cancel culture. It’s not even the image of National Guard troops patrolling Washington, D.C. The clearest image is one of masked ICE agents emerging from unmarked cars, roughing up suspected illegal immigrants—and then “disappearing” them to an unknown location.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” That’s how George Orwell put it, but it doesn’t have to be forever if more Americans start caring about their constitutional birthright. California’s Legislature isn’t a beacon of constitutional fealty, but one recent bill that’s on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk shows that some lawmakers are starting to get it.

Senate Bill 627 “makes it a crime for a law enforcement officer, as defined, to wear a facial covering in the performance of the duties,” per the legislative analysis. It includes some exceptions, such as allowing officers to wear masks during certain undercover and tactical operations and for medical reasons, but it’s otherwise simple. Newsom last week signed the bill.

Not surprisingly, police unions and sheriffs’ associations were opposed to it, as they typically oppose limits on their power. Almost as predictable, the key opposition came from Republicans—those politicians who endlessly prattle about the Constitution and express their concern about big government. Can you imagine anything less constitutional or reflective of big government than masked agents abducting people based on some unknown agent’s whims?

Sen. Tony Strickland (R–Huntington Beach), who at least manages to be consistent in his myriad big-government positions, called the bill “a reckless anti-law enforcement proposal that puts law enforcement officers and their families at real risk, undermining the safety of the men and women who bravely protect our communities.”

But author Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) got it right: “The recent federal operations in California have created an environment of profound terror, with officers—or people who claim to be officers—wearing what are essentially ski masks, not identifying themselves, grabbing people, putting them in unmarked cars, and disappearing them. If we want the public to trust law enforcement, we cannot allow them to behave like secret police in an authoritarian state.”

Rather than get owned by progressives on these basic issues, conservatives might want to re-read that Constitution that they often brag about keeping in their shirt pocket, or maybe glance at the Declaration of Independence. Our founders complained that the king “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Practically speaking, there is no reason for law-enforcement agents to conceal their identities, wear face masks, and grab people off the street without identifying themselves. How is an ordinary person supposed to know whether their abductor is a legit government agent or kidnappers from a drug cartel? In the former, fighting back will land you in the morgue—in the latter, not fighting back will do so.

Trump supporters claim the masks protect agents from doxing, but that’s just an after-the-fact excuse. This shouldn’t be news to conservatives, but the Constitution is meant to protect ordinary people from their government rather than the other way around. The first concern is to protect our liberties, not to ensure that armed agents have an easier time of it. Doxing is illegal and should be punished, but that’s no excuse to green-light police-state tactics.

“The general public does not distinguish between federal agents and local law enforcement,” said my R Street Institute colleague Jillian Snider in a CNN interview. “So when federal agents go into local jurisdictions wearing masks and not making their identities known, that hinders the operations of local law enforcement because then that community fails to trust the local law enforcement that are trying to keep them safe.”

Then again, perhaps that’s MAGA’s point: to intimidate Americans into submission via a high-profile show of force. We should be shocked by this, but the right response is disgust rather than awe.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.