David’s view
Last week’s Republican hairshirting of “sanctuary state” governors spent very little time on the front page. “I no longer fear going to hell,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz joked to an audience of D.C. progressives after the hearing. He headed home to a hell that consumed him for days.
But before that, in the House Oversight hearing room, Walz kept getting asked if he would apologize for calling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement “Trump’s modern day gestapo.” He refused to.
“Did you know ICE officers are facing a 413% increase in assaults?” asked Rep. John McGuire, R-Va.
“Don’t wear the mask, identify yourself, and work with local law enforcement,” said Walz.
“You guys are doxing them,” McGuire shot back. “Your attacks on ICE officers are putting our law enforcement in deadly situations.”
That exchange happened a few times, over the seven hour hearing — Walz saying that ICE agents should not wear masks, Republicans explaining that they had to. Walz, speaking for most Democrats and progressives, saw masked law enforcement officials as a sort of secret police, definitionally un-American. Republicans saw the masks as protection, which any members of law enforcement were entitled to. End of argument.
The pro-mask position was a long time coming. Before nearly everyone carried cameras with them, on their phones, arrests were filmed only if a TV crew was on scene or an amateur showed up with his gear. Body cameras on police became standard during Barack Obama’s presidency, as did citizens filming police officers when they made arrests. George Floyd’s murder was filmed, and uploaded to Facebook, by a 17-year old with an iPhone.
This worried tough-on-crime conservatives — not the Floyd evidence, but the trend of citizens filming police officers as they worked and exposing their names and badges. In several Republican-led states, “buffer laws” have allowed police to put 25 feet between them and any bystanders. The goal, said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was letting cops work “without worrying about harassment from anti-police activists.”
That’s also the goal when ICE agents protect their identity by masking up and wearing no identification. There truly are people who want to identify them and post their names online, just as there are people who will share locations of ICE movements to stymie the agents. The Trump administration’s position is that agents “must hide their faces” to prevent all this.
Word about this traveled fast. A number of people have been arrested for impersonating ICE agents, because that impersonation now means wearing a mask and claiming to be ICE. Democrats brought that up at the House Oversight hearing, though none of them challenged the calculation that anti-ICE attacks were up by 413%.
As Philip Bump wrote this week, that number “conflates assaults of officers engaged in official acts with putative threats to them personally.” The administration is comfortable bundling that together. The agents are trying to apprehend illegal immigrants; there are people who want to stop them from doing so and expose their identities; they deserve to be protected from that.
The result is that bystanders now don’t know who exactly is involved in ICE raids. Demanding that they execute the same raids, but with identification, is characterized as anti-cop and pro-anarchy. So is comparing any law enforcement to the “gestapo,” which Democrats once agreed was unacceptable. They said this when it was Trump using the term, talking about the Biden administration.
Notable
- In Slate, Sam Adams marvels at how quickly the masking of ICE officials became normalized. “It’s a basic principle of civil society that the increased power given to law enforcement officials is balanced by increased oversight, because the one without the other presents an almost irresistible temptation for abuse.”
- Philip Bump’s whole story for the Washington Post, on the creation of the “413% increase in assaults” number, argues that this “diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt.”