Decryption | The specter of a secret police

(New York) Was the handcuffs really needed? The question was asked to the Minister of Internal Security, Kristi Noem, after the muscular arrest of the Democratic Senator of California Alex Padilla. The latter had the impertinence to speak to her at a press conference that she held in Los Angeles on June 12.

“He did not identify himself,” said the former republican governor of the southern Dakota by answering the question on Fox News.

His reply was not only wrong, as demonstrated by the viral video of the arrest of Senator Padilla. It was also ironic, taking into account the criticisms formulated against the federal agents charged by Kristi Noem to stop migrants in an irregular situation in the United States or any other person deemed undesirable.

In videos as viral as that of the arrest of Alex Padilla, we see agents of immigration services (ICE) leaving trivialized vehicles, dressed in civilian clothes, their face hidden under a mask, a hood or a cache-cou, and proceeding to arrests without identifying.

In the eyes of some Americans, these videos evoke methods associated with totalitarian regimes, moreover or another era. During a recent hearing of the congress on so -called sanctuaries, the Massachusetts Democrat representative Stephen Lynch returned to the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, Turkish student from Toft University, near Boston, by ICE in civilian agents, the masked face, in the street, on March 25.

“When you watch the old gestapo films arresting people in the streets of Poland, and you compare them with these unidentified brutes who stopped this graduate student, it looks like a Gestapo operation,” said representative Lynch, referring to the political police of Nazi Germany.

Protect yourself against “Doxing”

The Ministry of Internal Security is indignant at this comparison. Its leaders argue that federal agents who arrests migrants in an irregular situation mask to protect themselves from “Doxing”. The expression refers to the disclosure of private personal information on the Internet.

“I am sorry if people are offended by the fact that they wear masks, but I will not let my officers and my agents go to the field and put their lives and their family in danger because people do not like what the application of immigration laws is,” said Todd Lyons, interim director of the ICE, at a press conference held in Boston, earlier this month.

Under the law, federal agents can cover their face in order to protect themselves against reprisals from drug cartels or other criminal associations.

But this practice was not common among the agents of the ICE before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, elected after promising the largest expulsion operation of migrants in American history.

For the association of the New York bar, masks are not only used (or really) to protect the agents of the Ice against “Doxing”. They also register (or especially) in “an attempt to escape the obligation to account for and reduce transparency in response to the growing allegations of excess of power, abuse of power and violations of constitutional rights”.

In a declaration published on June 20, the association also deplored that the port of the mask “makes almost impossible to distinguish the behavior of an impostor from that of an authorized agent”.

She intervened in the file three days after the arrest of Brad Lander, elected Democrat of New York, outside an immigration court, by a group of federal agents, of which at least two wore surgical masks, caps upside down, jeans and windbreaker jackets without insignia.

A law against the wearing of masks

In California, where the agents of the masked ICE multiply the descents, two elected democrats want to end the controversial practice. Two weeks ago, they presented a bill intended to prohibit representatives of the local, state or federal order to cover their face in the exercise of their functions.

“Recent federal operations in California have created an environment of deep terror. If we want the public to trust the police, we cannot allow them to behave like the secret police of an authoritarian state, “said state senator Scott Wiener, one of the perpetrators of the bill.

In a message published on X, the Ministry of Internal Security described as “ignoble” the rhetoric of Senator Wiener comparing the Ice to a “secret police”.

“While ICE agents are assaulted by rioters, a lax politician in terms of immigration attempts to prohibit agents from carrying masks to protect themselves against” Doxing “and attacks of known and presumed terrorist sympathizers,” added the ministry, whose statements are often false or outrageous.

This fierce defense of the law of the ICE agents to cover their face contrasts with the position of Donald Trump vis-à-vis the right of citizens to carry a mask during the demonstrations against his migration policies.

“The port of masks is not authorized during demonstrations,” said the president on Truth Social after seeing masked demonstrators in the streets of Los Angeles, where he had just deployed thousands of soldiers.

And to add: “What do these people have to hide, and why?” »»