The cowardice of masked law enforcement: Recent Kansas immigration raids remind us why faces matter

A masked ICE agent stands guard outside as ICE and other law enforcement agents raid a restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last year. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

“Disgusting,” a voice on the Facebook video says.

Captured in Kansas City, Kansas, this summer, the footage shows a handful of law enforcement officers — most of them masked — detaining a man. Their black SUVs surround his white pickup at the intersection of 6th Street and Central Avenue. After two minutes and 16 seconds, the officers have the handcuffed man in a back seat and drive him away.

The most common face covering among the officers is a black elastic cloth pulled up to cover their chin, mouth, cheeks and nose. As they mill around the intersection and inspect the truck, the thin fabric keeps each of them anonymous.

“They can’t even show their faces,” the bystander’s voice continues, before using an expletive to describe the agents.

As unprecedented immigration enforcement continues this week in Kansas and nationwide, the masks worn by law enforcement create a looming, yet cowardly, specter: law-enforcement officers so morally compromised by their work that they can’t show their faces, whether in Liberal or Garden City. Their work is so counter to the wishes of the community that they must hide themselves.

For the sake of this column, please reserve all of the other political and moral objections to the immigration raids — and there are many: separation of nuclear families, coordination with local law enforcement and insistence that you not record their public actions, because of a Kansas statute.

For a moment, let’s focus on the anonymity of the mask.

I could have written this column about masked agents in Kansas this summer or this spring or last year (as my Kansas Reflector colleague Max McCoy did). Choose your month and week. Federal immigration raids persist.

This week, local news outlets along with Kansas Public Radio reported that “ICE agents with masks covering their faces” were “stopping cars and questioning passengers” in Liberal. During a Kansas City, Missouri, raid this summer, another operation “involved at least six unmarked vehicles with Kansas and Missouri license plates,” as reported by KCUR. Immigration officers in Kansas are faceless and nameless, stripped of even the most basic identity, back story or credentials. 

Chilling photos by KCUR news intern Cassandra Isobelle Flores give us a clear look at the standard faux-military costumes the agents prefer: a backward baseball hat, a T-shirt, a tactical vest bulging with hidden gadgets, jeans and boots — every face covered in a mask.

If you had shown me these photos in 2010, I would have assumed they were from a country gripped by paramilitary violence. In 2015, I would have assumed they were actors on the set of “Homeland” or “24,” taking on the role of a CIA operative spiriting terrorists away to a black site for questioning.

We would all be terrified at being confronted by beefy men with badge numbers hidden, intent to stuff you into an unmarked car while refusing to identify themselves. Given the civic instability that their anonymous presence causes, it’s a stretch to even call them law enforcement. 

The federal agency alphabet soup decorating their vests is another matter. While they might claim that it helps to identify them as federal agents, it only makes them more mysterious because the acronyms are esoteric.

Most Americans and immigrants know the meaning of “POLICE” and “ICE.” 

But test yourself. I am going to give you three acronyms. Which two are actual immigration enforcement agencies? And which one is not? Your options: HSI, USIC and ERO.

Two of these acronyms appear on the tactical vests of agents in Kansas. Did you guess ERO, which stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations? What about HSI, Homeland Security Investigations?

(If someone is wearing a USIC vest, they are likely coming to locate underground utilities in your backyard.)

A law enforcement uniform is supposed to be exactly that: uniform. The crisp blues and badge of a traffic cop. The brown-on-brown of a sheriff’s deputy. The full range of military uniforms that designate: “This is who I am. This is my authority.”

The gear of today’s masked immigration officer as he walks main streets in southwest Kansas is intentional sartorial anarchy, saying: “I might look like this. Or like this. But regardless, you must obey.”

While I now live far from small-town Kansas, I once lived in a midwestern town smaller than Liberal, Dodge City and Garden City. I can imagine how residents would have reacted with alarm at seeing strangers dressed for insurrection. After all, the wonder (and claustrophobia) of rural life is how familiar you are with everyone. In the small towns of Kansas even more than big cities, masked strangers — especially a pack of swaggering and largely untrained strangers — creates outsized chaos.

The counterarguments from the Department of Homeland Security are shot through with hyperventilation, falsehood and distraction.

Why must their agents use masks?

Without masks, their identities could be revealed through doxing online.

Without masks, they would be “targeted by highly sophisticated gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13, criminal rings, murderers, and rapists.”

Officers are “flanked by vehicles marked with the name of the department,” a ludicrous claim that I needed to re-read three times.

This is normally the part of my column that I reserve for pointing at the prospect of change through state legislation. However, legislation in other states that aimed to unmask federal immigration agents has fallen flat. In New Jersey and New York, judges have paused state laws. In New Jersey, the Department of Justice argued in a court filing that the “supremacy” clause means that federal authority holds more power than a state law about masks. In New York, a judge cited the federal government’s designated role to police immigration as reason to defer to their masking policy.

In Washington state, a law has proven essentially toothless. Federal officers simply continue to wear the masks.

An executive decision by President Donald Trump has trickled down to small-town Kansas through Homeland Security instructions and policies with no recourse for normal citizens. This federal department and this careening president are aligned in wanting agents with masks on American streets.

But why?

I agree that one key reason for the masks is to create fear, of course. But another is shame.

Consider the pride of other civil servants and law enforcement: municipal police, firefighters and the military. The holiday parades. The public adulation. The local heroes. Compare that with the shameful image of an immigration agent — claiming to simply be doing his job — while hiding behind a scrim of facial obscurity.

Among the wash of jarring visuals from the Trump era, masked agents will be one of the most enduring. We will remember the sinister image: eyes perched above an anonymous male face tightly and darkly wrapped.

We will also remember the message of that image: one of impunity, cruelty and xenophobia, cloaked in the reassuring, condescending lie of “law and order.”

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.