Unmask ICE
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
There are more than 700,000 state and local law enforcement officers. There are tens of thousands more who work for agencies like the FBI, the National Parks, and the Treasury Department.
Except on rare occasions, like a SWAT raid on a drug gang, almost none of these officers cover their faces and hide their identities. Why does Kristi Noem’s ICE team feel this need?
Noem claims that ICE is going after the “worst of the worst” — murders, rapists, child sex traffickers, and the like. But this is just an absurdly crazy lie, like her claim that Trump has saved hundreds of millions of lives by blowing up the boats of alleged drug traffickers.
For those who need orientation to reality, the United States has roughly 340 million people. In Noem’s counterfactual, most of us would have died in the last six months from drug overdoses if Trump had not blown up those boats.
Noem is clearly a person who is not just open to exaggerating and outright lying, she is someone who makes up absurd tales that have nothing to do with reality. This is the case with her story that ICE is going after the worst of the worst.
To be clear, some of the people ICE is looking to deport are in fact murderers, rapists, and other really bad guys. But when ICE identifies these people, it has no problem getting the cooperation of state and local law enforcement. There is no one in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago or any other sanctuary city or sanctuary state that is objecting to enforcing the law against violent criminals, whether citizens or immigrants.
The issue of non-cooperation only comes up when ICE is looking to deport immigrants, many of whom have legal status, who are working at the ordinary jobs that have brought tens of millions of people to the United States in recent decades. These are people working in construction, as housekeepers in hotels, as home health care workers, and many other jobs that are mostly low-paying and physically demanding.
The claim of the Trump administration is that, even though your average local cop can go unmasked to arrest someone charged with multiple murders, ICE agents need to wear masks and conceal their identities when nabbing a dishwasher in a restaurant. That may make sense in Trumpland, but in reality land, it’s goddamn nuts.
There is nothing resembling a legitimate reason for ICE agents needing masks to conceal their faces and to hide their identities. This is about Donald Trump creating a secret police force that is unaccountable to anyone, and which openly boasts that it is not bound by the Constitution.
If the Democrats, and really any elected official with a commitment to democracy, want to be taken seriously, they need to demand that the ICE agents take off their masks. There are many other things that need to be done to protect the country from Trump’s attacks on democracy, but unmasking ICE is a simple and essential first step. There literally is no argument on the other side.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Federal law enforcement officials “have ignored basic human rights in their enforcement activity against Minnesotans, especially targeting Somali and Latino communities,” said the ACLU.
Federal agents clash with protestors outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 15, 2026.
(Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Feb 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
The ACLU revealed on Wednesday that it has asked a United Nations committee to initiate “urgent action” protocols over the Trump administration’s human rights abuses in Minnesota.
The national ACLU, alongside the ACLU of Minnesota, said that it reached out to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on Tuesday and asked it to “use its early warning and urgent action procedure in response to the human rights crisis following the Trump administration’s deployment of federal forces in Minneapolis and the St. Paul metropolitan area.”
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In its submission, the ACLU alleged that federal immigration officials “have ignored basic human rights in their enforcement activity against Minnesotans, especially targeting Somali and Latino communities,” and it called on CERD to “issue a decision under its early warning and urgent actions procedures to intervene and investigate the US’ grave violations of its human rights obligations.”
Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, said that the US government is in violation of international human rights treaty obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which prohibits “the use of racial and ethnic profiling, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful use of force against protesters and observers.”
Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota, explained the urgency in getting the international community to intervene in the US government’s operations in her state.
“The Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota are being carried out by thousands of masked federal agents in military gear who are ignoring basic constitutional and human rights of Minnesotans,” Nelson said. “Their targeting of our Somali and Latino communities threatens Minnesotans’ most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods.”
February 4, 2026
U.S. Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) hold a press conference at Karmel Mall, after the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S., January 28, 2026. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, announced Wednesday that 700 immigration agents are leaving Minnesota, but with around 2,000 expected to remain there, Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose district includes Minneapolis, declared that the drawdown is “not enough.”
As part of Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge,” agents with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have invaded multiple Minnesota cities, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and committed various acts of violence, such as fatally shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
In a pair of social media posts about Homan’s announcement, Omar argued that “every single ICE and CBP agent should be out of Minnesota. The terror campaign must stop.”
“This occupation has to end!” she added, also renewing her call to abolish ICE—a position adopted by growing shares of federal lawmakers and the public as Trump’s mass deportation agenda has hit Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, multiple cities in Maine, and other communities across the United States.
In Congress, where a fight over funding for CBP and ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is playing out, Omar has stood with other progressives in recent votes. The bill signed by Trump on Tuesday only funds DHS through the middle of the month, though Republicans gave ICE an extra $75 billion in last year’s budget package.
During an on-camera interview with NBC News’ Tom Llamas, Trump said that the reduction of agents came from him. After the president’s factually dubious rant about crime rates, Llamas asked what he had learned from the operation in Minnesota. Trump responded: “I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch. But you still have to be tough.”
“We’re really dealing with really hard criminals,” Trump added. Despite claims from him and others in the administration that recent operations have targeted “the worst of the worst,” data have repeatedly shown that most immigrants detained by federal officials over the past year don’t have any criminal convictions.
Operation Metro Surge has been met with persistent protests in Minnesota and solidarity actions across the United States. Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that “the limited drawdown of ICE agents from Minnesota is not a concession. It is a direct response to Minnesotans standing up to unconstitutional federal overreach.”
“Minnesotans are winning against this attack on all our communities by organizing, resisting, and defending our constitutional rights. But this moment should not be a victory lap,” Hussein continued. “It must instead be a call to continue pushing for justice. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration agents remain uninvestigated, and communities and prosecutors alike have raised grave concerns about violations of their oaths and the Constitution. This is not the time to pull back, it is the time to deepen our resilience, increase our support for one another, and keep fighting for our democracy and accountability until justice is served.”
The Not Above the Law coalition’s co-chairs—Praveen Fernandes of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Kelsey Herbert of MoveOn, Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, and Brett Edkins, of Stand Up America—similarly said that “Tom Homan’s announcement that 700 federal immigration agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota is more a minor concession than a meaningful policy shift.”
“The vast majority—approximately 2,000 federal agents—remain deployed in the state, and enforcement operations continue unabated,” the co-chairs stressed. “This token gesture does nothing to address the ongoing terror families face or the constitutional crisis this administration’s actions have created.”
“The killings of Minnesotans demand real accountability,” they added. “Families torn apart by raids and alleged constitutional violations deserve justice. Real change means the complete withdrawal of all federal forces conducting these operations in Minnesota, full accountability for the deaths and violations that have occurred, and congressional action to restore the rule of law. The American people deserve better than political theater when constitutional rights hang in the balance.”
On Tuesday, the state and national ACLU asked the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to “use its early warning and urgent action procedure in response to the human rights crisis following the Trump administration’s deployment of federal forces” in the Twin Cities.
“The Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota are being carried out by thousands of masked federal agents in military gear who are ignoring basic constitutional and human rights of Minnesotans,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota. “Their targeting of our Somali and Latino communities threatens Minnesotans’ most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods.”
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