Our immigration cops have donned masks. Time to ask what they — and we — are hiding.

What’s behind the mask?

If you’ve seen news footage of federal immigration raids — and really, who can avoid it these days? — you may have noted how many of the agents doing the raiding are wearing masks.

More often than not, ICE agents have their faces covered with neck gaiters or balaclavas as if they were on a covert mission in Beirut. They’re outfitted in military kit as well, from tactical vests to sidearms in drop leg holsters, which all looks a bit weird when worn over T-shirts and blue jeans. But I suppose they might be going for a kind of undercover cowboy look.

But the image the masked agents convey, more than any other, is secret police.

It’s a distinctly un-American look, one that is likely to terrify the migrants being sought for deportation and just about everybody else who witnesses an ICE arrest. There might be reasons for agents to don masks when pursuing international criminals in the crime-infested back alleys of some movie Gotham, but we’re talking raids on a meatpacking plant in Omaha, a Home Depot parking lot in California, a Mexican restaurant in Kansas City. It’s part of the recent Trump administration push to deport 3,000 migrants a day.

When I heard of that quota I couldn’t help but connect it to the 3,000 deaths per day from COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic, in December 2020. It might be a coincidence, but the pandemic was the last time masks were such a cultural flash point, with conservatives fighting mask mandates as an assault on personal freedom.

Civilians wear masks as well, from anti-police protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, to the white supremacist Patriot Front, which marched last month at the Liberty Memorial. Some people still wear pandemic-era masks to protect themselves from the flu and other communicable diseases. But ICE agents and law enforcement officers operating on American streets should not.

Like most of us, I had limited experience with masks before 2020.

My strongest memory of wearing a mask was when I was a kid, not yet 10 years old, waiting for Halloween to come so I could wear the scratchy plastic Superman mask with the elastic strap that invariably would snap back and sting my neck. The dime store costume was uncomfortable, just a printed plastic sheet, and that damned mask was sweaty even though it was cold outside. But there was a thrill to being somebody else for a while, to being anonymous and demanding tribute of strangers, of running up and down the streets of Baxter Springs with a paper grocery bag filled with loot.

Masks are, of course, subversive. Children know this, as do grown-up Mardi Gras revelers, bank robbers and other outlaws, Ku Klux Klan members, and the creators of comic books. According to Nobel-winning Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti, in his 1960 book “Crowds and Power,” masks are fixed and the things they represent can never change.

“It is a conclusion,” Canetti wrote. “Once the mask is in position there can be no more beginnings, no groping towards something new. The mask is clear-cut; it expresses something which is quite definite, and neither more nor less than this.” 

Everything behind the mask is mysterious, according to Canetti.

“Above all it separates,” Canetti noted. “Charged with a menace which must not be precisely known — one element of which, indeed, is the fact that it cannot be known — it comes close to the spectator, but, in spite of this proximity, remains clearly separated from him. It threatens him with the secret dammed up behind it. Unlike a face, there are no passing changes in it which can be interpreted, and so he suspects and fears the unknown that it conceals.”

In other words, it intimidates. It’s why ICE and other immigration agents have adopted the mask as an unofficial part of their uniform, not for protection but for the fear it provokes. Others in the public sphere — teachers, election officers, federal judges — haven’t resorted to hiding their faces. That’s because those professions rely on the public trust, and that’s difficult to achieve when you’re covering your face, as if in shame.

For years, there’s been a dangerous blurring of the line between law enforcement and the military. Increasingly our cops look less like they belong in Mayberry and more like they’re ready for a combat zone, with assault rifles, helmets, and mine-resistant armored vehicles. Military gear has been flowing from the federal government to state and local agencies for decades, shaping tactics and influencing culture. Federal law prohibits the military from being deployed on American soil for law enforcement duties, but so many cops resemble soldiers now that it’s difficult to tell one from the other. Immigration agents wearing masks and boiling out of unmarked vehicles just makes the situation worse.

Despite politicians who try to scare us into believing there’s an epidemic of crime in our cities, statistics show violent and property offenses have plunged since the 1990s. Instead of endangering us, most migrants are working in slaughterhouses, bussing tables, and cleaning motel rooms. You know, the kinds of jobs many Americans just don’t want. Mass deportations could trigger serious economic consequences, from higher housing prices to a shrinking economy.

In addition to the economic threat, Trump’s war on migrants also poses dangers to American democracy. The speed and manner of the deportations are limiting migrants’ access to legal representation and due process, something I wrote about a few columns back. This might not seem like a problem if you’re not a migrant at risk of deportation, but the erosion of due process won’t stop with immigration enforcement. Like a cancer, it will spread to other areas of our justice system.

Another danger has emerged with the recent immigration raids and protests in Los Angeles, and the Trump administration calling out nearly five thousand National Guard troops and U.S. Marines in response. Remember the federal law that generally forbids the use of the military in civilian law enforcement roles? It’s called the Posse Comitatus Act. The last time the act was suspended and a state’s National Guard was federalized over the wishes of its governor was in Alabama in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act to enforce federal law and protect civil rights marchers. Trump has not cited the Insurrection Act, however, and his deployment of 700 Marines to Los Angeles to quell recent immigration enforcement protests adds to our growing constitutional confusion.

The difference between 1968 and today is that Johnson was acting to ensure the safety of civil rights protestors, which Gov. George Wallace refused to guarantee. Now, Trump has federalized the National Guard over the objections of California and called up the Marines not so much to restore order in Los Angeles — the demonstrations have been largely peaceful, despite some oft-repeated footage of Johnny Cabs on fire — but to add players to his chaotic immigration enforcement theater. It’s about the spectacle of power, the demonstration of force, and pushing the narrative of blue states as sanctuaries of anarchy.

The law-and-order mask of the Trump administration disguises more than just an abuse of power. The face beneath the mask is itself grotesque, the kind of racist visage that looks kindly on white South African “refugees” but which has contempt for the lamp, the door, and the brown-skinned masses yearning to breathe free. It is the face of a felon 34 times over, that of a hypocrite who pleads law and order but pardons Jan. 6 insurrectionists, that of someone who dodged the Vietnam draft on a medical pretext but who lusts for massive military parades on his birthday.

Trump turned 79 Saturday. The military spectacle of tanks and helicopters and thousands of troops — ostensibly to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday — was estimated to have cost up to $45 million. It was an obscene waste of money, especially at a time when Veterans Administration cuts are forcing “crisis” staffing levels.

We always knew what was behind Trump’s mask. But just enough of us suspended our distrust to put him back in office. Trump is the Exxon Valdez of politics, the Typhoid Mary of bad ideas, the patron saint of the grift.

The masked federal agents enforcing Trump’s immigration agenda are a symptom not just of Trump’s political pathology, but of ours. I’m not talking about any bogus buzz phrase like “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — the only one truly deranged here is Trump himself — but of our collective political inability to recognize objective reality. It is so much easier to cast Trump as the agent of our misfortune than to address the conditions that allowed for his rise. Citizens United, for example, gave the wealthy nearly unlimited political influence and the Tea Party movement planted the seeds of today’s psycho populism. We tell pollsters the economy is the top issue but elect candidates who make our lives, fiscal and otherwise, worse.

“The oppressed,” wrote Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, “having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.”

Masks are fine for Halloween and Mardi Gras, but they are a poor substitute for self knowledge. I no longer want to be Superman, or any of the pop figures I’ve worshipped in the years since that sweaty and greedy Halloween, but I long now to be myself.

I long for America to be itself.

We must remove our own masks and contemplate the living, hopeful, and changeable human faces beneath. We share the same basic needs — economic security, access to affordable health care, a sense of belonging, meaningful endeavor — and yet we have a remarkable capacity for uniquely expressing those desires. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking nothing we can do individually will make a difference, yet I forget that collectively we are America, that for good or ill the choices are ours. We can give up. Or we can work together for a better tomorrow.

But first, we must all drop the masks.