Americans generally oppose the idea of masked secret police. The reasons are numerous: the need for accountability, maintaining trust in law enforcement, and the unsettling nature of such anonymity. More practically, it poses a danger when it’s unclear who is a legitimate officer. This concern was highlighted when a Minnesota legislator, Melissa Hortman, and her husband were tragically killed by an assassin disguised as law enforcement last year. The dilemma arises when one can’t distinguish whether they’re being forcibly removed from their home by ICE or by impersonators.

In response, California enacted the No Secret Police Act last year, which limits mask-wearing for federal law enforcement, along with the No Vigilantes Act, mandating identification for officers. The Department of Homeland Security quickly challenged these laws on constitutional grounds, and a judge has yet to decide on a preliminary injunction.

In Congress, efforts like the No Secret Police Act in the House and the VISIBLE Act in the Senate aim to prohibit masks on ICE agents. However, with Republican control in both chambers, these bills face slim chances of becoming federal law. Undeterred by federal inaction, state legislatures are advancing their own measures. Despite DHS’s legal pushback against California’s law, states continue to propose anti-masking bills.

Progress is being made on bills introduced last summer, with states such as Maryland, Vermont, Washington, and Georgia unveiling new proposals recently. Los Angeles has already implemented a city ordinance, and St. Paul is considering similar action. A Minnesota legislator plans to propose a bill in the upcoming session. In total, at least 15 states have pending anti-masking legislation.

Meanwhile, ICE remains steadfast in its use of face coverings. In a recent Face the Nation interview, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused the host, Margaret Brennan, of revealing the identity of Jonathan Ross. Ross, identified as the ICE agent involved in the shooting of Renee Good, was wearing a face-obscuring gaiter in numerous video recordings of the incident.

“Don’t say his name, for heaven’s sakes. We shouldn’t have people continue to doxx law enforcement when they have an 8,000 percent increase in death threats against them,” Noem scolded Brennan. When Brennan pointed out that his name was public knowledge, Noem responded, “I know but that doesn’t mean it should continue to be said.”

“The threats to federal officers are serious and potentially deadly,” the US Department of Justice claimed in its lawsuit to enjoin the No Secret Police Act. A list of such threats includes “taunting” and “online doxxing.”

A press release on the Department of Homeland Security website claims that death threats against ICE agents have increased 8,000 percent, and that assaults have increased 1,300 percent. The web page consists mostly of a lot of blurry screenshots of X posts. There are a handful of photos of injuries supposedly suffered by ICE agents — two photos of a hand bleeding from what is supposed to be a bite, and another photo (face partially obscured) of an agent with a busted lip.

This 1,300 percent increase in the kind of blood loss you’d get from a minor skateboarding injury is not a particularly compelling reason to allow law enforcement to wear masks. Noem sounds like a clown when she goes on about ICE agents getting doxxed. But she’s a clown with the law on her side.

California’s No Secret Police Act faces an uphill battle in the courts. For one thing, the law targets federal law enforcement but doesn’t apply the same requirements to local police. If that were the only problem that would just be a matter of fixing the wording. But unfortunately for the 15 similar bills are pending in other state legislatures, the most fundamental issue at play — the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution — gives the feds an advantage. States have a very limited capacity to affect how the feds do their jobs: that is sort of the point of federalism, after all. One legal expert claims that it is “clear” that the No Secret Police Act is constitutionally invalid; another makes the much more optimistic assessment that “under existing precedent, mask bans are neither clearly prohibited nor clearly permissible.”

But this being an open question of law is a bizarre insult to the conscience. It’s not just that it’s perfectly legal for ICE to mask themselves, it really might be illegal for the state of California to try and stop them.

Normal people despise the masks. Only 31 percent of Americans think ICE agents should be allowed to wear them. Even the sheltered, shrinking bubble of Republicans — whose approval of ICE floats somewhere between 70 and 80 percent — falters in enthusiasm when it comes to what ICE agents are wearing. (63 percent of Republicans are okay with the masks, but a majority of Republicans think agents should be in uniform.) After a Reagan-appointed federal judge heard out the reasoning for the masks, he called it “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable,” saying that “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”

When faced with the Trump administration’s single-minded obsession with “doxxing,” judges have often been either bemused or enraged. Part of this may be that most judges aren’t weird little internet forum trolls for whom doxxing is the greatest imaginable threat anyone can face. But more importantly, a federal judge — whose name and face are a matter of public record — frequently makes decisions likely to piss off very dangerous and violent people. The idea that an officer of the law must be faceless to do their job is an insult to their own line of work.

Cops, too, are not entirely sold on the masks — the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a resolution warning against the use of face masks. In an interview with NPR last year, the head of the organization called face coverings “a real slippery slope,” saying that the masks undermined police legitimacy. “We feel strongly that the face coverings are inappropriate in most cases in policing in a democratic society in 2025,” he said.

This comes up in California’s defense of the No Secret Police Act and No Vigilantes Act — showing a face and a badge has long been a standard practice for policing at both the federal and local level. “Before January 2025, when the practice of conducting civil immigration enforcement in masks and without identifiers began, officers generally wore an ‘ICE’ or ‘ICE POLICE’ insignia with visible badge and number,” the state of California wrote in its response to Homeland Security’s lawsuit.

The state conceded that “while all law enforcement agents should be entitled to protection from harassment and doxxing,” it charged DHS with offering “no evidence that masking or refusing to wear a badge or identification number—practices virtually unheard of before 2025—does anything to ameliorate this risk.”

The masks aren’t normal. Americans don’t like them. The fact that California’s attempt to ban them is in dicey legal territory is a strong indicator that things have gone seriously sideways.

Policy ought to reflect the will of the people in a democratic society. California should not be in court defending its law from the Supremacy Clause, because it should not have had to pass the law in the first place. In a saner world, Congress would have passed a federal version of the No Secret Police Act; in an even saner one, the executive branch would be at all responsive to the objections of voters, and would have stopped the practice entirely.

Faceless officials with guns and body armor are crying about how scared they are of having their names on the internet, while shooting unarmed Americans in the face. The American system of government was not meant to be this unmoored from reality; normal constitutional workings are under strain because the federal government is too internet-addled to tell the difference between doxxing and murder. California’s No Secret Police Act is the backup generator turning on because the entire grid has collapsed. If it does manage to survive in court, it won’t be enough to save our democracy. And if it is struck down — well, there’s no backup for the backup generator.