All the king’s masked and anonymous henchmen
In the Trump administration's elevation of lawless federal agents, we can see a parallel denigration of the meaning of American citizenship
The federal occupation of Minneapolis has focused public attention on the full significance of Trump administration anti-immigrant efforts not only in Minnesota, but across the country. More than anywhere else, events in the Twin Cities have highlighted how the war on immigrants is simultaneously an initiative to cow and punish blue state Americans — particularly those who happen not to be white, and, as in the case of Minnesota, those who are white but have the temerity to defend their besieged neighbors of color. In particular, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti demonstrated that not even white citizens are safe from state terror.
Central to the abuses is a perverse reversal of the rights and responsibilities of citizens on the one hand, and law enforcement agents, on the other. In an authoritarian twist, the power of ICE and Border Patrol officers is held to be vast, overriding any competing rights among the public they are supposed to serve. Stephen Miller, in his inimitably shrill style, laid this out in a message to ICE officers:
You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.
As many have pointed out, the claims of “immunity” for federal agents to do whatever they want are deeply bogus — but given the Trump administration’s increasing lawlessness, and the message of impunity this sent to those deployed to Minneapolis and elsewhere, we need to take such claims seriously for the real-world harm they encourage.
One seemingly minor detail of Miller’s statement stood out to me: his claim that “anybody who lays a hand on you [. . .] is committing a felony.” That the concept of total immunity extends to the very bodies of federal agents, so that merely touching them constitutes a grave and actionable offense, is logically consistent with their supposedly enormous power. And it evokes something else as well: the idea that federal agents are inviolate in a quasi-religious sense, as if to dare to “lay hands” on them is to betray the very order of the universe. It smacks of a monarch’s elevation above common men, and the way that his servants and henchmen embody his authority. And the unspoken corollary of this formulation hangs heavy on the ordinary citizen: our bodies have no such right to be free of harm, and in fact deserve whatever corporal punishment is deemed necessary by those who carry out the sovereign’s directives.
From this perspective, the separation between the citizenry and federal agents could hardly be more profound, akin to the gulf between a sacred elite and the profane masses. Perhaps most strikingly, any notion that they serve on behalf of, and as the representatives of, the public, is shot completely to kingdom come. Even mere dissent (“Anybody who [. . .] tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you”) is illegitimate, a violation of the hierarchy of power — if the government does it, it’s absolutely right, and who is a mere citizen to object? Federal agents serve and embody the president, rather than the people, who are reduced to mere objects.
You can see this worldview reflected in the masking that has become a regular part of immigration agent kit, along with the military garb and weaponry that likewise communicate a fundamental antipathy to the citizens they purportedly serve. Defenders of the practice claim that masking is meant to protect the identities of federal agents, so that they are not made vulnerable to public exposure and criminal retaliation. But as Garrett Graff makes clear in a recent piece, claims that immigration agents face special danger are wildly overwrought; he quotes a CATO Institute study that notes that in 2025, “The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered.” As Graff concludes, “Being an elementary school student in the United States is more deadly than being an ICE officer.”
Rather, as Adam Serwer recently argued, masks and other methods of anonymity destroy the means of holding these agents accountable to the public, and instead encourage a sense of impunity. Serwer concludes that the impunity may well be the point, that “the masks may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to make it easier for them to do unspeakable things.”
But while masking is a practical enabler of agents’ impunity, it can’t help but highlight the fraudulence of the idea that our government is not supposed to be accountable to the American people. The administration’s perceived need for face coverings evocative of Iranian secret police and Russian security agents helps us recognize that assertions of state supremacy and citizen insignificance are claptrap, the stuff of dictatorships and in utter contradiction to a constitutional order in which the people are ultimately sovereign. Accountability can only be severed by adopting methods obviously alien to any reasonable definition of American democracy and freedoms; Americans cannot in good faith be called “free” to the degree armed, masked paramilitaries of the state are free to violate our bodily integrity, and even shoot us dead, with impunity. Indeed, the increasing pushback against masking — even Senate Democrats appear to have included this in their list of demands to continue ICE funding — shows a broad public recognition of its unacceptability.
This is still truer in the case of the ultimate reversal that the masked, impervious agents represent: the transformation of citizens into abject subjects, and the elevation of armed, masked men to demigods who rule over them, in which the bodies of the former are considered to be expendable and the bodies of the latter sacrosanct. But even as the physical act of masking seeks to pervert public servants into the people’s masters, we should bear in mind what it is meant to specifically accomplish: to enable and encourage violence against the citizenry, or, as Serwer puts it, to allow them “to do unspeakable things.”
So as much as it’s necessary to strip marauding federal agents of their masks and other anonymizing elements, as a key way to remove their sense of impunity, it’s also necessary to take a hammer to the broader mindset that federal law enforcement are untouchable figures who have license to engage in extreme violence against the citizenry. Less obvious is that as part of doing so, we should recognize that the aura of inviolability Miller has tried to claim for federal agents is actually the right of every citizen. We have an urgent need to revisit the general complacence with which we treat the daily spectacle of beatings, kidnappings, and other acts of violence against citizens and immigrants perpetrated by federal officers under the color of “immigration” enforcement. A healthier democracy would treat as extraordinary even a single incident of state violence against a single innocent American — or against an innocent immigrant. It is a sign of faint hope that the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti may finally be stirring the public not only to recognize our common vulnerability, but the outrageous existence of this vulnerability in the first place.
This in turn would require us to reckon with the decades-long erosion of rights vis-a-vis municipal and state law enforcement agencies around the country. We have unfortunately become accustomed to, if not outright accepting of, militarized visions of law enforcement, which have achieved broad immunity under the law to use force against civilians. We can see now that not only did this steady accretion of power at the expense of ordinary citizens prepare the way for ICE and Border Patrol excesses, it also laid the groundwork for a would-be tyrant like Donald Trump: not only by providing him with the tools to try to physically intimidate and harm his opponents, but by chipping away at the sense of individual power and collective sovereignty he seeks to overthrow. Abused for so long by supposed public servants who acted like the henchmen of a dictator, our sense of our own rights and power was dangerously eroded, and made the arrival of an aspiring dictator that much more plausible.