DHS Says Fed Agents Wear Masks to Protect Themselves from "Tren de Aragua and MS-13, criminal rings, murderers, and rapists"
Masked agents are abducting people from courthouses, workplaces, and off the street.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told The Carceral Report in a statement that federal agents wear masks “to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13, criminal rings, murderers, and rapists.”
The Carceral Report had reached out to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by email as part of its investigation into how federal agents in Chicago came to possess an unmarked van with New Jersey license plates. The van was used in the abduction of U.S. citizen Debbie Brockman. Before placing her in the van, video of the abduction shows masked Border Patrol agents handcuffing Brockman while she’s pinned to the ground.
In response to The Carceral Report’s media query, CBP emailed a statement attributed to McLaughlin:
DHS is not going to confirm our vehicles and put an even larger target on our officers’ backs. When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13, criminal rings, murderers, and rapists.
For months, masked agents have been terrorizing and abducting people from courthouses, from the street, and from workplaces.
California recently passed a law requiring officers not to wear masks, with few exceptions, while performing their law enforcement duties. The Trump administration slammed the ban.
“We don’t need to abide by this garbage,” McLaughlin posted on X.
In September, U.S. District Judge Bill Young condemned the administration’s use of masked officers. In his opinion, Young, who was appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan, wrote:
ICE goes masked for a single reason -- to terrorize Americans into quiescence. Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor -- and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it. “We can not escape history,” Lincoln righty said. “[It] will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
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