No wonder agents arresting people at Phoenix immigration court wore masks

[struggle4progress]

It's understandable for agents to mask up when dealing with drug cartels, members of violent criminal gangs or other bad actors. But people voluntarily showing up for a court appearance?

Portrait of EJ Montini
Arizona Republic
22 May 2025

... You know as well that they probably filled out a CBP One application, the method by which most asylum seekers were able enter the United States at ports of entry, and now are showing up for their scheduled court appearances.

When they get there, Department of Justice attorneys are dismissing their cases, then telling you to arrest them as they leave the building. Not because they have done anything wrong, but because the Trump administration has changed the rules.

So, it becomes your job to handcuff people who have done exactly what they agreed to do under conditions set by the government. Some young. Some older. Some mothers with children ...

A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Arizona Republic that the agency could not provide details of any operations ...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2025/05/22/phoenix-immigration-court-ice-agents-wear-masks/83784414007/

[struggle4progress]

1. Arresting immigrants who came into the country legally and played by the rules.

Laurie Roberts
Arizona Republic
Updated 22 May 2025

... This week, masked federal agents are staking out the immigration court in downtown Phoenix, arresting people who appear to have come into the country legally — handcuffing them and carting them away.

One woman, who was with her 14-year-old son, told an Arizona Republic reporter that she didn't know she would face arrest for appearing in court.

In other words, for following the rules ...

Trump is going after people who made appointments to come into the country legally to seek asylum — people who were issued court dates and showed up for those hearings ...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2025/05/21/arizona-immigration-court-arrest-trump-deportation/83778737007/

[struggle4progress]

2. ICE Agents Routinely Mask Up When Seizing People

May 12, 2025 10:18 AM
By Walter Olson

... (apparent) agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one wearing a balaclava to hide his face, seized two men at the Charlottesville, VA, courthouse. The sequel, as reported by the local paper, the Daily Progress, was that an *unnamed* (!) ICE spokesperson threatened to prosecute two persons at the scene who challenged the action and asked the agents to identify themselves or show a warrant. The headline read: “ICE promises bystanders who challenged Charlottesville raid will be prosecuted.”

Leave aside the question of when, if at all, it is proper to prosecute bystanders under these circumstances. Why is it considered acceptable for ICE enforcers to wear masks to hide their identity in the first place? They did so last week, a video shows, when they arrested Newark, NJ Mayor Ras Baraka as he protested at a detention facility. A casual search reveals that ICE agents have worn face coverings, ski masks, and the like in raids and stops reported from around the country (Westminster, MD; Douglas County, CO; Great Barrington, MA; Bellingham, WA). Federal agents wore masks when they abducted Turkish grad student Rümeysa Öztürk off a street near her Boston-area home. (She was freed by a judge last week.) The Trump Department of Homeland Security appears to have made it standard practice.

At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police?

People who mask themselves before street confrontations ordinarily do so to avoid legal and public accountability, especially when they are up to no good ...

https://www.cato.org/blog/ice-agents-seizing-people-now-routinely-wear-masks-thats-wrong

[struggle4progress]

4. Make ICE Take Off Their Masks

... If they were doing anything honorable they would show their faces. The fact that they are not, means they know what they are doing is wrong.

It’s also possible for anyone to put on a mask and to engage in carjacking and other crimes ...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/13/2322093/-Make-ICE-Take-Off-Their-Masks

[struggle4progress]

3. Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses?

by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published May 13, 2025, 10:59 a.m. ET

... remember that documentary that Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson put out there a few years back with the fear-soaked title, The End of Men? This televised moral panic about the feminization of modern American life featured men indulging in all sorts of gross-out quackery to reconnect with society’s lost manhood ...

... I’ll tell you my first candidate for getting zapped down there: the performatively male officers who work for America’s alphabet soup of Department of Homeland Security agencies — especially U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its little sister, Homeland Security Investigations.

They are suddenly everywhere all at once — waiting for hours in unmarked cars before pouncing in their blue jeans and untucked shirts, never wearing a badge but almost always donning a ski mask or a full-blown balaclava, even on 80-degree days. They epitomize America’s de-evolution from G.I. Joe to Mort from Bazooka Joe, but with less maturity than that, as they push around teenage girls and octogenarians, and are barely believable when they command, “We are the police!”

These dubious tactics — which are meant to intimidate undocumented immigrants and the American people writ large — instead reek of the agents’ own fear and paranoia. That came to a head last Friday in a shocking incident in which these masked desperados went wild over a lawful inspection of Newark’s new ICE detention facility by three New Jersey members of Congress and the city’s mayor ...

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/ice-immigration-arrests-trump-pope-leo-xiv-villanova-20250513.html

[Irish_Dem]

6. They are a disgraceful bunch, nazi gestapo.

Ashamed of themselves or afraid.
Both for good reason.

Evil cowards.

[LymphocyteLover]

8. 100%. Despicable people.

[Midnight Writer]

5. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be ICE agents.

How proud their families must be!

"My son wears a mask, carries a truncheon, and kidnaps and molests people who are playing by the rules. Many of his victims will never be seen again. We are all so happy for him!"

[Diamond_Dog]

7. Probably a lot of them are J6 freed prisoners.