SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
accountability
Unmasking ICE
Preventing federal immigration officers from hiding their identities as they morph into Trump’s personal paramilitary force isn’t demonizing them, it’s requiring them to function like every other law enforcement officer in the country.
Feb 10, 2026
Democrats want President Donald Trump to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement by following the rules that govern every other law enforcement agency in the country. But a particular sticking point has become the demand that ICE and Border Patrol officers stop wearing masks during enforcement operations.
It should be a “no-brainer.” But Republicans say it’s a “nonstarter.”
In fact, Republicans are so wedded to their objection that they’re willing to shut down other critical Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, US Coast Guard, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Ironically, blocking DHS’ appropriation would have a minimal impact on ICE because Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” provided ICE with $85 billion—making it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency and more than twice that of the Justice Department, which includes the FBI.
The GOP’s Specious Argument
Republicans claim that unmasking ICE would endanger the officers because protesters might learn their identities, which would threaten the officers’ safety. It’s nonsense.
Local police officers don’t wear masks.
County sheriffs don’t wear masks.
Instilling fear in the populace and avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing are not proper governmental objectives in any nation that values personal liberty.
State troopers don’t wear masks.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents don’t wear masks.
FBI agents don’t wear masks.
When any of these officers and agents engage in law enforcement activities, the individuals they stop can demand identification and the officers must provide it. Confirming the officers’ identities assures that they are not imposters. And it assures a path to their potential accountability.
The GOP’s Real Reasons
History is filled with notorious examples of sinister mask wearers: Terrorists who execute hostages, robbers, thieves, kidnappers, home invaders, Ku Klux Klansmen, Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire’s storm troopers.
Add ICE and the Border Patrol to that roster of villains.
With masks, identification becomes more difficult, resulting in an obstacle to accountability. At the same time, the anonymity of a mask enhances a sense of power in the person who wears one. For victims, the result is enhanced fear.
Instilling fear in the populace and avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing are not proper governmental objectives in any nation that values personal liberty. But Republicans insist that ICE and Border Patrol officers wear masks as they spread terror throughout communities.
Doxing v. Death
Dressed for combat, ICE and Border Patrol officers roam the streets; generate protests; and respond with tear gas, smoke bombs, and deadly force. Since ICE began Trump’s crackdown, their bullets have struck at least 10 people—including four US citizens. They have killed three of them.
Meanwhile, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and other senior members of the administration pledge to “stand behind” the shooters, wrongly claim that the officers have “unqualified immunity” (they don’t), and falsely blame the victims as “domestic terrorists” (they weren’t).
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is concerned about doxing. Recently, Tillis asserted, “In today’s world, I could take a picture of you and I guarantee you within 12 hours, I will have facial recognition of you, and then I dox you. If you are in an active, potentially dangerous situation, I’ve got no problem with them putting a mask on.”
Unmasking ICE won’t stop the damage that Trump’s immigration crackdown is inflicting on America every day. But it would send a message of accountability to a federal law enforcement agency that is out of control.
Routinely, police officers and other law enforcement officials “are in active, potentially dangerous” situations too. But unlike ICE, those officers haven’t created those dangerous situations. And unlike ICE, they respond with deescalation strategies to defuse them.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “What I will tell you is the president is never going to waver in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and protecting the public safety of the American people and his ardent support of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol who, unfortunately, the Democrat Party has made a decision to demonize.”
Preventing ICE and Border Patrol officers from hiding their identities as they morph into Trump’s personal paramilitary force isn’t demonizing them. It’s recognizing their danger and requiring them to function like every other law enforcement officer in the country.
Unmasking ICE won’t stop the damage that Trump’s immigration crackdown is inflicting on America every day. But it would send a message of accountability to a federal law enforcement agency that is out of control. And it just might save lives.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Join the National Push to Make Polluters Pay
From January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a week of action to stop the fossil fuel industry from passing the bill for the climate crisis onto the rest of us.
Jan 26, 2026
Climate change isn’t looming somewhere down the road. For millions of families, it’s already showing up as higher insurance bills, higher utility costs, flooded roads, closed schools, and budgets stretched past the breaking point. And for others, it’s far worse—lost homes, lasting health impacts, and lives cut short. The damage from the climate crisis isn’t a distant projection. The bill is real, and it’s already due.
The problem is who’s paying it.
Right now, American families and state governments are picking up the tab for climate disasters while the fossil fuel companies that knowingly caused the damage keep raking in record profits. Every storm that wipes out a neighborhood, every heatwave that overwhelms hospitals, every wildfire that shuts down a school adds another line item to public budgets, and another cost pushed onto taxpayers and our families.
That imbalance is why, from January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a Make Polluters Pay Week of Action. It’s the opening push of the 2026 legislative session and a clear signal that polluter accountability is no longer a fringe idea, but a governing priority.
Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill.
The logic is simple: If you caused the harm, you should help pay for the repair.
This is how we already handle toxic waste, oil spills, and industrial contamination. We don’t send the cleanup bill to families who live nearby. We send it to the companies that made the mess. Climate superfund laws apply that same common-sense principle to the climate crisis, and voters understand it.
In fact, support is growing fast. Recent polling shows that 77% of voters now support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages, including majorities of Republicans and Independents. Support has jumped more than 10 points in the past year as the real-world costs of climate damage become impossible to ignore.
In 2024, Vermont and New York became the first states in the nation to pass climate superfund laws, requiring fossil fuel companies to contribute billions toward disaster recovery and climate resilience. In 2025, nearly a dozen more states introduced similar legislation. In 2026, that momentum is only accelerating.
The Week of Action reflects that reality. Across the country, states will introduce new climate bills, hold lobby days and town halls, deliver petitions, publish op-eds, walk out of classrooms, and rally public support—all aimed at starting the year with one message: Taxpayers shouldn’t be the default insurer for fossil fuel pollution anymore.
This push is happening now because delay has a cost. Every year we fail to act, the damage compounds and the bill gets bigger. A recent study found that climate costs to the US economy likely topped $1 trillion in 2025. That’s money coming out of household budgets, local tax bases, and already stretched state services.
This is also happening as federal accountability collapses. Agencies meant to protect communities and prepare us for disasters, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Weather Service, are being gutted, with another 1,000 FEMA jobs reportedly on the chopping block just as disasters intensify. At the same time, President Donald Trump is cozying up to fossil fuel executives, helping them dodge accountability and fight efforts to make polluters pay.
Every dollar collected from polluters is a dollar that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Climate superfund funds can build flood protections, harden the grid, prevent wildfires, create lifesaving cooling centers, and keep hospitals and schools functioning during disasters. It also supports good jobs, since rebuilding roads, bridges, and energy systems requires skilled labor. For families, stronger grids mean fewer outages and repairs, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and loopholes can free up billions to lower utility costs, expand clean energy access, and invest in communities instead of corporate giveaways.
The fossil fuel industry wants this conversation to feel radical. It isn’t. What’s radical is a system where companies profit while the public pays, where disasters are treated as unavoidable acts of nature rather than the predictable result of decades of pollution.
Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill. The Make Polluters Pay Week of Action is about answering that question with action. Not someday. Not after the next disaster. Now.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Many More Deaths Will It Take for Congress to Hold ICE Accountable?
Violence has followed wherever President Donald Trump has dispatched immigration agents in the name of “public safety.”
Jan 15, 2026
On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis—a city long enriched by immigrants and now under assault from thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents.
Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, was driving alongside her wife, Becca. They were observing an ICE raid in their community. “We stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” said Becca.
Sadly, at least three other people have been killed by ICE officers in the last five months, according to The Marshall Project.
Among them was Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father and cook originally from Mexico, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Chicago suburb. Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two—and, like Good, a US citizen—was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles.
Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice.
While the families of all these victims await justice, the violence continues. ICE agents have shot at least nine people in their vehicles since September. The Department of Homeland Security has routinely invoked “self-defense” to justify these shootings, despite video and witnesses repeatedly contradicting their accounts.
From Los Angeles to Washington DC, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, Charlotte, and now Minneapolis, violence has followed wherever President Donald Trump has dispatched immigration agents in the name of “public safety.”
On the same day Good was murdered, ICE conducted a raid at a nearby Minneapolis high school, reportedly tackling a teacher and harassing students. The next day, ICE agents in Robbinsdale, Minnesota forcibly detained a US citizen and Red Lake Nation descendant for no apparent reason. Stories of new outrages emerge almost daily.
And last fall, federal agents descended from Black Hawk helicopters in a midnight raid of an apartment building in Chicago, detaining all its residents, including children. (That’s in addition to killing Villegas González—and shooting another person five times.)
This escalating violence is an outgrowth of ICE’s appalling treatment of immigrants. Across the country, people have been rounded up, thrown in deadly prisons, and ripped from their families—a trend that has sharply escalated under Trump.
Thousands of masked agents in unmarked cars—equipped with military-grade weapons and the latest surveillance technology—treat cities like war zones while executing raids at workplaces, places of worship, and schools.
Citizens and noncitizens alike have been racially profiled and kidnapped at courthouses and off the streets without warrants or probable cause. Trump has also used ICE to attack free speech, abducting and jailing students like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk who spoke out against the Gaza genocide.
In addition to the shootings, 32 people died in ICE custody last year alone—and as of this writing, four more people have died in custody so far this January.
Abysmal conditions in ICE prisons, including medical neglect, have resulted in these tragic and avoidable deaths, leaving families shattered and still searching for answers. Nearly 69,000 people are currently being held in ICE prisons, the vast majority of them without a criminal record. According to ProPublica, ICE also detained over 170 US citizens last year.
ICE has repeatedly denied members of Congress entry to its detention facilities, interfering with Congress’ constitutional oversight authority. Still, Congress enables ICE’s abuses through billions in funding increases. ICE’s $14 billion annual budget for detentions alone, note Lindsay Koshgarian and Sarah Lazare, is more than the total military spending of 124 countries.
Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice. A recent poll shows, for the first time, net positive support—including among self-described moderates—for abolishing ICE.
These Americans understand that no one is safe as long as ICE still exists, operates with impunity, and terrorizes communities. How many more deaths will it take for Congress to hold this agency accountable?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular