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department of homeland security
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.
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Body Cameras for Federal Agents Is Not the Solution You Think It Is
Research suggests that the public should lower their expectations of body cameras, including assumptions that equipping federal officers with the devices will somehow effect change.
Feb 05, 2026
The US federal government has announced that it will “immediately” equip all its Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis with body-worn cameras, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with plans to outfit all federal officers nationwide.
The announcement follows criticisms in response to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who killed two protesters last month in Minneapolis. The initiative to require federal law enforcement officers to wear body cameras has bipartisan support and is popular among the public.
But will body cameras effect change?
Research on the efficacy of body cameras is inconsistent. In 2018, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report outlined the primary reasons cited for law enforcement use of body cameras. These included increasing the quality of evidence, decreasing civilian complaints, reducing agency liability, and enhancing officer safety. However, according to a January 2022 National Institute of Justice report, the “research does not necessarily support the effectiveness of body-worn cameras in achieving those desired outcomes. A comprehensive review of 70 studies of body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects.” Nevertheless, in May 2022 then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order expanding body cameras to federal law enforcement officers.
Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.
Why would President Biden sign an order to expand an otherwise inconsistent technology to law enforcement when acknowledged as such by his own government agency? The answer is because the promise of body cameras is based mostly on popular beliefs and assumptions even when the evidence does not support that the devices would deliver the results the public desired.
In our new book Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, we trace the broader shift in the rationale for body camera adoption to concerns over transparency and accountability. Indeed, “transparency” was cited as the primary reason in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement to equip its officers with body cameras.
Transparency is characterized by visibility. However, the release of body camera footage or agreement over what footage necessarily shows can never be assumed.
In October 2025, a judge in Chicago ordered all ICE agents in the city to wear body cameras after reviewing clips of submitted footage from officers who had already been equipped with the devices. In December, in response to a records request of immigration operations in Chicago, ICE reported that it had no body camera footage despite that it had earlier submitted footage. It remains uncertain if the footage will ever be released.
DHS has indicated it has body camera footage of CBP shooting and killing Alex Pretti last month in Minneapolis. There are widespread calls to release the footage including by politicians like the mayor of Kansas City who said, “Video is only great if we can see it.”
If seeing were only that simple.
Video footage, whether from body cameras or another source, is never some sort of objective arbiter of truth as it is routinely asserted. Instead, narratives are presented that explain footage to viewers, whether it be to the public or in a courtroom to a jury. Research has shown that narratives presented as textual descriptions have had an influence in how audiences judge what is depicted in video recordings, including body camera footage.
The 1991 bystander recording of police beating Black motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles is a standout example of narrative influence. At the time, the recording was considered the most extraordinary recording of police brutality to be shown on television. The footage, which many people believed very clearly showed police beating an unarmed man on the ground, was used as key evidence at the trial that resulted in the acquittal of four officers because of the ability of the defense to offer a counternarrative of the police beating.
The recent use of artificial intelligence has only further complicated such matters.
Last month, the White House released a digitally manipulated image of an ICE arrest. The image was different from other released AI materials in its presumably intended realism, which casts doubt on visual evidence released from the government moving forward. Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.
As if all of this wasn’t already enough, research examining online user assessments of video as possible evidence of a crime has found that people mostly interpret what they see as it best corresponds to their worldview. And alternative views are unlikely to sway them. The use of AI has only exacerbated this process, as online users across the political spectrum have manipulated images of bystander recordings of Alex Pretti’s killing to correspond to contradictory politically inspired narratives about his death. How then might body camera footage of Pretti’s killing fit into the discordant political discourse, assuming the video is released?
What this all suggests is that the public should lower their expectations of body cameras, including assumptions that equipping federal officers with the devices will somehow effect change. Moving forward clear policies governing the use of body cameras, like when cameras should be activated and a timeline for release, are important next steps. Policies prohibiting the official manipulation of any evidence including body camera footage should also be enacted.
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Somalis, Haitians, and Trump’s Crusade to Make America White Again
In the name of “defend[ing] your homeland” and “defend[ing] your culture,” his administration will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, tear-gas, use children as bait, deny people their rights, deport, murder US citizens, and terrorize communities across the nation.
Feb 02, 2026
Not finished terrorizing Minnesota, the Trump administration is seeking to open a new front in their war against America. This time, the battlefield will be Ohio, and Haitians will be the scapegoat.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would end Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for Haitians, with an effective termination date of February 3, 2026. According to a federal notice issued by DHS in November 2025, “Based on the Department's review, the Secretary [Kristi Noem] has determined that while the current situation in Haiti is concerning, the United States must prioritize its national interests and permitting Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the US national interest.”
Per this federal notice, “there are Haitian nationals who are Temporary Protected Status recipients who have been the subject of administrative investigations for fraud, public safety, and national security.” No specifics are offered with regards the scope of this problem, or even the number of Haitians on TPS who have been charged or convicted of any crimes. Instead, they offer a few specific examples. This includes people like Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles, who importantly was not a TPS recipient.
Nevertheless, DHS argues that Charles’s “case underscores the broader risk posed by rising Haitian migration,” especially in the context of a “high-volume border environment” with poor vetting. They allege that the “inability of the previous [Biden] administration to reliably screen aliens from a country with limited law enforcement infrastructure and widespread gang activity presents a clear and growing threat to US public safety.”
The actions we take today will determine whether America embraces multiculturalism or becomes an ethnostate that treats diversity like a plague to be eradicated.
In short, DHS offers no concrete evidence that Haitians on TPS pose an actual threat to public safety or national security—only that they might pose a threat because their potential for being a threat was not properly assessed. Moreover, this potential cannot be properly assessed now because Haiti’s “lack of functional government authority” makes it too difficult to access “critical information” (e.g., criminal histories).
As per usual with the Trump administration, fearmongering replaces facts. In 2021, President Donald Trump claimed that all Haitians have AIDS—this is false (obviously). In 2024, he claimed that, “In Springfield, [Haitians] are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” There were no credible reports of this occurring.
Trump describes immigrants as dangerous criminals. Yet, studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—commit far fewer crimes than US citizens. Haitian immigrants are no exceptions. Undocumented Haitian immigrants, for instance, have an incarceration rate that is 81% below US-born Americans.
The situation in Ohio is also no different. In Springfield, home to one of the state’s largest Haitian communities, “Haitians are more likely to be the victims of crime than they are to be the perpetrators in our community. Clark County jail data shows there are 199 inmates in our county jail this week. Two of them are Haitian. That’s 1% (as of Sept. 8).” The thousands of Haitians with TPS protection living in Ohio have made themselves indispensable to the state. As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, remarks, “If you took Haitians away overnight, I will tell you that the business people there will tell you that’s going to be a big problem for the economy of the community.” In Springfield alone, Haitian immigrants have contributed to higher wage growth while reversing the city’s population decline.
Despite this, DHS will deliberately send Haitians back to a country that they themselves describe as being currently unsafe. So, the question is: why? The answer is because they are Black and foreign. This is also why his administration is so aggressively targeting Somalis.
For Trump, both Somalia and Haiti are “shithole countries”—“places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” At the 2026 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Trump ranted: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed—it’s not a nation.”
In Trump’s view, Somalia and Haiti are dirty and crime ridden because their people are dirty and prone to crime. Places and people are inextricably tied to him—bad people will always produce bad places; bad places are always the byproduct of bad people. If the US is failing, it’s because we have “imported” too many bad people. This is why, for Trump, almost every social problem from housing affordability to low wages to employment to high crime rates can be solved by mass deportations. From healthcare to election integrity, immigrants are the problem for his administration.
This sentiment is explicitly expressed by US Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller. He remarks, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Mass migration for Miller is a cross-generational problem. In his view, if Somalis come to America, then they and their children will cause America to fail just like they caused Somalia to fail. For Miller and Trump, this is a problem of cultural and biological determinism. It is a problem of “bad genes” that determine behaviors like criminality, as well as “toxic” ideologies like diversity, equity, and inclusion and ‘hateful’ beliefs like Islam that impede American progress.
When Trump remarks that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our country,” the poison in question is the people themselves and the threat their mere presence represents. Put another way, for Trump, all immigrants from poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are akin to tumors in the body politic. Whether they are malignant or benign makes little difference, the safest and most effective response is to surgically remove (deport) them. Even if it turns out that those growths are helping the body politic, they are still foreign agents that should not be present. They are not part of the “very special culture” that built the West—“the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common.” An inheritance that must be protected from “unchecked mass migration" and “endless foreign imports.” Whether it’s MAGA’s racism or MAHA’s anti-vaxxerism, the Trump administration will reject anything it arbitrarily deems a foreign toxin.
While the Trump administration has deployed federal agents across the nation, we should not be surprised that the “largest immigrant operation ever” has targeted Somalis, a community of predominantly Black, Muslim, and immigrant people. Whiteness and Blackness have always been direct polar opposites within the Western racial imaginary—the former signifying all that is good, the latter all that is bad. For Trump, it is whiteness that “abolished slavery; secured civil rights; defeated communism and fascism; and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.” Of course, none of this is true: Haiti was the first nation to end slavery, Black and other people of color fought for civil rights, and the Trump administration is a fascist regime.
None of these facts will stop the Trump administration’s crusade against “foreign invaders” spawned from “hellholes” who threaten “civilization erasure.” In the name of “defend[ing] your homeland” and “defend[ing] your culture,” his administration will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, tear-gas, use children as bait, deny people their rights, deport, murder US citizens, and terrorize communities across the nation. No cost is too high in this Holy War to save the proverbial soul of America.
We are at a critical juncture. The actions we take today will determine whether America embraces multiculturalism or becomes an ethnostate that treats diversity like a plague to be eradicated. We must continue to protest nationwide against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration. We must continue to monitor and observe ICE’s tactics. We must push elected officials to fulfill their obligation to the people and use their authority to keep Trump in check. At a time when the Trump administration wants nothing more than to divide us, we must come together and resist.
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