The images have become ubiquitous in the Trump administration’s campaign for mass deportations of immigrants.
Masked agents, swathed in tactical gear and carrying semiautomatic firearms, menace protesters with chemical sprays and smash car windows while dragging immigrants from their vehicles.
Takeaways
- Some legal experts believe prohibiting federal law enforcement from masking their identities is not settled law, despite the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
- Law enforcement is seeking to strike a balance between a tradition of requiring police to wear badges and nameplates and modern realities like COVID and doxing.
- Social scientists have spent decades studying how masking or shielding the identity of soldiers, police and others has links to aggressive behavior.
Critics label the aggressive actions by unidentifiable agents as a calculated effort by the Department of Homeland Security to send a paramilitary force into select American cities.
But the cheapest and most basic part of federal agents’ gear — face coverings of knit and cloth masks — is the focus of legislation at the federal level, in statehouses and smaller municipalities across the nation, including in Jackson County…