A few days after President Donald Trump took office, I got an invitation from ICE officials to observe the administration’s new “surge operations” in New York City. They told me to show up at 4 a.m. at the downtown federal building where the agency has its holding cells. Officers in body armor huddled in the basement parking garage, then headed to the Bronx in a caravan of unmarked cars. The trip wasn’t particularly remarkable. Over the next few hours, officers made just one arrest. ICE officials were flustered that morning because Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, had shown up to join them, along with a CBS News crew. Noem began posting videos about arresting “dirtbags” before the sun was up. ICE officials had always insisted to reporters that social-media posts or any mention of ongoing operations would blow their cover and put officers in danger. But Noem was new, and eager to look tough, and the officers I talked with mostly just laughed it off. By mid-morning, the ride-along was over.Looking back at the photos I took that day, one thing stands out. The ICE officers weren’t wearing masks.The face coverings and neck gaiters went up soon after. A mid-February viral video from York, Pennsylvania, showed five officers in masks hauling away a man who begs to call his wife. In March, ICE grabbed the Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk—whose visa was revoked for co-writing an op-ed about Gaza—and surveillance footage showed her surrounded by agents in plain clothes, some with hoods, who yanked up their masks as they dragged her away.As Trump’s deportation campaign escalated, the masks quickly turned officers and agents into a faceless, impersonal, undifferentiated goon squad. It’s a look that has long been associated with authoritarian regimes and secret police, and the basic visual signifiers of American law enforcement—criminals wear masks; cops show their faces—were suddenly inverted. In videos of masked officers that have gone viral since then, it’s often hard to tell who is speaking, let alone what agency they belong to. Some of the encounters are so rushed that they look like abductions, not conventional arrests, and activists have started calling the federal agents “kidnappers.”Face coverings are now a standard accessory for federal immigration enforcement, and a symbol of the mass-deportation campaign that is Trump’s top domestic-policy initiative. Veteran ICE officials I spoke with view the use of masks as an unquestionably negative development. But most of them see an evil that is necessary.The job, under Trump, has changed. Immigration enforcement has traditionally happened more quietly and administratively, in jails or at ICE check-in offices, where the work is more akin to case management. Trump officials ordered officers into the streets and pressured them to meet arrest quotas, while turning the job into a kind of public performance by bringing news cameras and the administration’s own film crews to make Department of Homeland Security propaganda videos. Activist groups and protesters record everything too, trailing the agents and officers with cellphone cameras, berating them and broadcasting the ugliest moments. Every encounter carries the risk of a viral interaction and online infamy that could lead to doxxing or something worse.The masks were a way for officers to opt out—to wall off the political complexities of their work or, for some, the moral ones.[Read: ICE’s ‘athletically allergic’ recruits]“The excuse I have heard is, ‘I signed up for this, my family didn’t,’” one ICE official wrote to me. They described colleagues who say they’ve been “demonized” by their relatives and neighbors, or who say their children have been taunted in elementary school. The official, who was not authorized to speak with reporters, sympathized with colleagues who wear masks, but acknowledged that masking has an insidious effect on police work.“People tend to be worse when they can be or think they are anonymous,” the official told me. “You think about what you are doing and how you are doing it when you know a particular use of force can be tied to who did it.”The face coverings are not mandatory. Most federal agencies do not provide them, and not every officer and agent uses one. In February and March, when masks became more common, ICE leaders discussed whether to restrict their use, according to current and former ICE officials I spoke with. Some officers had grown accustomed to wearing masks and neck gaiters during the pandemic, and officials adopted a permissive approach to their use, leaving it to individual discretion. Officers typically remove the masks when they’re speaking to one another away from the cameras, or performing other nonpublic duties, then pull them up once they’re making an arrest or see that they’re being filmed. “It’s part of their uniform now,” another ICE official told me. “It’s second nature.”None of the dozen or so current and former officials I spoke with said they thought the masks would come off anytime soon. Not in the new era of online activism, facial recognition, and anonymous threats. Not with the Trump crackdown escalating and becoming more confrontational.Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, told CBS News that he wasn’t a “proponent of the masks,” but he would allow them if officers thought they would help “keep themselves and their family safe.” Noem said that the masks help officers protect themselves “in dangerous situations,” and that DHS agencies could set guidelines for their use. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the department, told me in an email that federal law-enforcement officers are facing a rash of threats and assaults “including terror attacks, cars being used as weapons, bounties to murder them placed on their heads.”“That is why our officers wear masks,” McLaughlin wrote. “Protecting their identity is one way to prevent bad actors from targeting their homes and threatening their families.”In September, three women were charged in California for following an ICE agent home and posting his address on Instagram. Two men in Georgia were indicted by a grand jury last month for threatening to harm an ICE agent in social-media posts that included images of the man and his spouse. And a Mexican man living illegally in Dallas was arrested on October 14 after offering $10,000 for killing ICE agents in posts on TikTok.But sometimes, the masks are used as tools of intimidation. On Halloween, federal agents in Southern California were photographed heading out to make arrests wearing ghoul masks. When the news site L.A. Taco asked DHS about the costumes, McLaughlin sent a two-word response: “Happy Halloween.”[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable. ]To speed up immigration arrests and deportations, DHS has pulled in help from the FBI, U.S. Marshals, and other Department of Justice agencies—and those federal agents have adopted masks, too. Natalie Baldassarre, a spokesperson for the department, did not respond to questions about department policies regarding face coverings and agency identifiers. “Protecting the safety and security of our federal law enforcement officers ridding our country of dangerous illegal aliens will continue to be a top priority for this Administration,” Baldassarre wrote in a one-sentence response. One ICE official told me that DOJ agents sent to help them seem even more eager to hide their faces. “They mask up even more, because they don’t love being out with us,” he told me.Some of the National Guard forces sent by Trump to protect ICE officers and buildings cover their faces, but the troops patrolling Washington, D.C.—and picking up litter—generally don’t wear them. The National Guard does not have a uniform policy governing masks, and a spokesperson for the Guard told me their use can be set by whichever state or federal authority is in charge of their deployment.Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / GettyThe masks, which DHS insists are a means of keeping officers safe, have also served as a rallying point for protest and a spur to confrontation. They “immediately escalate things,” another former ICE official told me, and reinforce an impression that agents and officers are ashamed of what they’re doing. Officers and agents with faces covered have been confronted by local residents and protesters who denounce them as “cowards” for hiding their faces.In Washington, Trump opponents have launched a street-art campaign, plastering the city with posters that say Take off your masks! and Why are you hiding your face? Public servants should face the public. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has not opposed the National Guard troop deployment but has urged federal forces not to wear masks and to clearly identify themselves on city streets.Democrats have introduced legislation that would bar federal agents from using masks during immigration arrests, but the efforts are mostly symbolic. “The United States is not a dictatorship,” Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who introduced the “No Secret Police Act” in June, said in a statement. He called his proposal “commonsense legislation ensuring that our federal government’s laws are enforced by identifiable human beings, not anonymous, secret agents of the state.” California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law legislation with the same name. It’s due to take effect January 1, but it’s unclear how state authorities expect to enforce the law against federal agents and officers.The legislation demands that federal agents and officers wear uniforms and insignia that clearly identify the agencies they work for. Many of the agents use ballistic vests with generic labeling that says Police or Federal Police. Others say ERO, which stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations—the deportation arm of ICE—but the acronym isn’t well known to the public. Veteran officials I spoke with said the lack of clear labels isn’t a deliberate attempt to evade responsibility. They offer a more humdrum explanation: bulk orders of protective gear made by different agencies, at different times, without a single standard.Some ICE officials I spoke with said they would welcome clearer identifiers because they resent being blamed for violent incidents involving U.S. Border Patrol agents. Trump’s crackdowns in Los Angeles and Chicago have been led by Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, and many of the viral arrest videos on social media have involved his forces, not ICE officers. The White House signaled a preference for Bovino’s tactics last month when the administration started replacing even more ICE leaders at regional offices with Border Patrol commanders. In DHS social-media videos promoting Bovino’s commando tactics, he is often the only Border Patrol figure without a mask, a visual effect that enhances his performative role in Trump’s campaign.[Read: The hype man of Trump’s mass deportations]Border Patrol and ICE tend to have a different approach to immigration enforcement: ICE officers are used to working in U.S. cities and targeting specific individuals they’re seeking to arrest. Border Patrol agents work in remote desert and mountain areas where they are trained to see anyone they encounter as a suspected illegal entrant. They don’t hesitate to use force on suspects who run or resist arrest. But they’ve never been deployed to U.S. cities at this scale, hundreds of miles from any border crossing.Jason Owens, who retired as Border Patrol chief in April, told me that he understands agents’ decision to conceal their faces. “I’m having a tough time blaming our folks when I see what the crowds and extremists have been capable of,” Owens told me. He said agents keep patches with their badge numbers clearly visible on their uniforms, and do not use masks with skulls or other “unprofessional markings.”When I worked as a reporter in Mexico covering the drug war in the early 2010s, the police and soldiers often wore masks, while the criminals went around with their faces showing. The cartels would learn the identities of officers and soldiers, and try to corrupt them. If they refused to take bribes, they were targeted for assassination. This offer was called plata o plomo—“silver or lead.” A bribe or a bullet.Those who did take the bribes and worked for the traffickers would continue doing so in their police or military uniforms, leaving no way for the public to tell who was who. It became safer to assume the cartels were everywhere. Trust in police, and public institutions more broadly, steadily eroded, allowing lawlessness—or unaccountable, arbitrary assertions of state power—to flourish.The U.S. does not have a similar crisis of corruption in its law-enforcement agencies, but criminals in the United States have started using masks to impersonate federal officers, making it hard for ordinary citizens to know whether an armed masked man is there to enforce the law or to break it. There have been more cases of ICE impersonators this year than during the past four presidential administrations combined, according to CNN. In June, two masked men wearing vests that said ICE stopped a motorist and robbed him at gunpoint in Delaware. In August, a masked gunman robbed a grocery store in Colorado Springs after flashing a fake ICE badge. Masked men impersonating FBI agents robbed a home in Southern California last month.Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which works with police agencies to promote best practices, said there has long been a divergence regarding transparency in the way state and local police departments operate compared with the feds. “Why do police officers have their names on their uniforms, and their badge numbers? All of those things have evolved over time because police officers work in the community, and the community pays their salaries,” Wexler told me. “That is what trust and good policing look like.”When officers are involved in a shooting or another use of force, these departments typically release the name of the officer as a matter of accountability, he added.Federal forces take orders from the White House, not the cities and communities where they’re working. The masks, Wexler said, are partly the product of a wider trust gap brought about by Trump officials claiming to be targeting dangerous criminals—“the worst of the worst.” Instead the public sees agents grabbing people not engaged in any obvious criminal activity: mothers walking children to school, landscapers coming home from work, families in the hallways of courthouses.Wexler said police departments in some cities are getting 911 calls from community residents reporting the presence of armed masked men in their neighborhoods, hoping local officers can protect them. “I think most people who live in those communities want the worst of the worst deported,” Wexler told me. “If ICE agents were arresting or deporting the worst of the worst, they probably wouldn’t have to wear masks.”