Masks have become the central symbol of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement wilding sprees across America in 2025. They are emblems of a secret police. Their gaiters and balaclavas convey menace. But their central justification is the idea that the agents themselves are endangered by their work, that their identities must be kept secret because they are endangered by the very public they menace while at least notionally working to serve and protect. The general argument is that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents risk being “doxxed,” being identified and having their private information and home addresses made public. But the word has been the subject to an absurd expansion. Earlier this week I heard an anecdote about a group of ICE agents who were eating at a Minneapolis restaurant. A right-wing account said the agents were then “doxxed,” which in this case meant that activists saw them and sent out word to other activists who then started protesting outside the restaurant.

It’s remarkable how accepted this purported need for anonymity has become. Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has become increasingly outspoken about ICE and called for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to lose her job. But he still thinks ICE agents should remain masked because of this fear of “doxxing.” A bunch of the country seems to have forgotten that even the most abusive of metropolitan departments require their officers to show their faces and wear name tags as a matter of course.

In this post I want to dig more into that rationale: that the people who are entrusted with the power to wield legitimate violence to serve the public need special protection, special rights to privacy and anonymity in order to do so. What is implicit in this claim is that ICE needs to do its work in a highly abusive manner, or perhaps even that its work is to be as abusive as possible. Why else do they need to be more anonymous than your average beat cop? If they’re going to get a lot of people mad, it just follows that they need some additional protection from the consequences of generating that kind of anger.

Needless to say this argument treads a pretty slippery slope.

Kate and Josh discuss the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents, and its still-unfolding fallout.

From TPM Reader JL …

I agree with a lot of your post on disorganized retreat.  But I want to come at this from another angle.

For the most benefit practically and politically over the next few months, the concession that is most important imo is giving MN AG full, real time access to all evidence.  Not to be crass about it but the public loves a murder trial.  Talking about legislative constraints on ICE will put the public to sleep.  But the public will have an endless appetite when it comes to pursuing justice for Alex Pretti and putting the man who shot him in the back of the head in jail.  

Big public and political fights often have the dynamics of military confrontations. The ongoing backlash and outcry over the ICE murder of Alex Pretti is one such example. Over the first days of this week, the Trump White House lost its footing on the whole issue of ICE wilding sprees in Blue cities. As we discussed yesterday, they’re trying to manage what amounts to a live-action rebranding, telling the public they’re getting things back into line without, if possible, changing anything. But the White House’s public line on ICE and its Blue state wilding sprees has been so categorical and over-the-top it’s a really tough pivot. It’s hard to get your footing when you’re rapidly going from “ICE is our warrior force against immigrant-befouled hellholes run by domestic terrorists” to “we need a real investigation and ICE probably shouldn’t be murdering this many people.”

Yesterday I discussed how in a flash, over roughly 24 hours, the Trump administration began to lose control of the public narrative about ICE and its wilding missions in Minneapolis. The public has been turning against ICE for months. This isn’t new. What we see now is the fragmentation of the pro-ICE wilding chorus. These propaganda choruses are like schools of fish. They are marvelously united and function in a way that no fish has any interest in straying from the school. They flit this way and that but always in unison. When they begin to fragment, that coherence breaks apart very rapidly as the incentive for each fish to stay in line diminishes.

I want to recommend a new article in The Atlantic, one by Adam Serwer, the kind of article only Adam can write. The gist is that ICE and MAGA are losing in Minneapolis in large part because the citizens of the city are performing — really embodying — a resistance of mutual protection. MAGA (and its paramilitary wing, ICE) presents itself as a movement of social solidarity, camaraderie and valor based on ethnic and ideological purity. But it’s the citizens of Minneapolis who are embodying those values. Good and Pretti lost their lives acting as observers, spotters, place-your-body-in-the-breach defenders of people they didn’t know. They showed bravery and selflessness and concern for their neighbors, the kind of intense communalism MAGA posits as commonplace in a lost golden age that can be regained with a purifying violence.

In just the first month of this year, President Trump’s forces have abducted a foreign leader and fatally shot two U.S. citizens protesting the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown. Laws are being bent, twisted and broken so frequently and so egregiously that it’s hard to keep up. 

Everywhere we’re seeing signs that ICE, the White House and its virtual army of influencers, agitators and generalized degenerates are losing control of the public narrative surrounding the murder of VA ICU nurse and activist Alex Pretti. These things don’t come in one coherent motion. You see it more in a kind of fragmentation, a general loss of a coherent and aggressive message. Individual players and factions start groping for their own climb down and then often at one sudden point run rapidly for the hills. The White House and ICE have over the last 48 hours simultaneously been claiming that Pretti was there for a mass shooting of ICE agents, so thank god they killed him, and, also, that Pretti’s death is a terrible tragedy and it’s all Governor Tim Walz’s fault because Minneapolis is a sanctuary city. Those two messages don’t really hold together.

Things accelerated from there. Just today, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the White House needs to “recalibrate,” which presumably means not murdering so many civilians or at least not doing it on camera. A Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, Chris Madel, who is currently representing Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot Renée Good to death, dropped his candidacy, blaming ICE, and even left the Republican Party. The president himself seems to be moving to declaim any ownership of Pretti’s murder by sending Tom Homan to Minneapolis as his man who “has not been involved in that area” (i.e., isn’t the one who is doing all the killing) to get the situation under control and “report directly to me.” These moments of breakdown in the White House’s feral and, to date, overwhelmingly united propaganda campaign were matched by dozens of other MAGA influencers and other members of the GOP who could not quite manage to keep yelling that Pretti’s killing was anything other than murder.

Opposition to garrisoning soldiers in civilian towns was a cornerstone of the American Revolution as well as an essential element of the American civic tradition. The Boston Massacre was a key accelerating event in the build-up to the American Revolution. The 3rd Amendment bans the quartering of soldier in homes except under specific and limited circumstances. I’ve written a number of times about how when it comes to this part of the American civic tradition we’re much too literal today about what constitutes an army or soldiers. Let me say a bit more about that.

Today we tend to think of two groups who wield legitimate violence on behalf of the state: police and soldiers. Police deal with citizens and law and order, while soldiers go to war. But policing organizations and other civilian paramilitaries are a very modern invention. They go back around two centuries and most of their history goes back less than 150 years. Those include metropolitan police departments as well as organizations like the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and various others.

There is another point I want to note about what has happened over the last 48 hours. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is a pretty forward-leaning lawmaker. But on a show this morning he said something very clear: “We cannot fund a Department of Homeland Security that is murdering American citizens.” That’s clear, succinct and accurate. Those are the stakes. DHS is being used as a domestic terror force to deprive American citizens of their liberties. Yes, they’re killing American citizens. But that’s with the goal of terrorizing the larger population and depriving it of its liberties.

Pam Bondi sent the state a letter offering to withdraw ICE agents if the state will turn over welfare rolls, voter rolls and end sanctuary policies. So the administration will withdraw its marauding gangs in exchange for state leaders surrendering citizens’ right to local self-government.

I’m going to post TPM Reader DS’s note and follow up on the concept of “escalation dominance” and who exactly has the upper hand in Trump’s war on blue cities. I said in my earlier post that the White House thinks it has escalation dominance, the stronger hand at every stage of escalation. I think they’re wrong. The simple explanation is that they think this is a battle of force. It’s not. It’s ultimately a battle over public opinion. And it’s one they’re already losing. Escalating the contest of force will make them lose harder.

The concept of escalation dominance comes out of Cold War deterrence and strategic theory. DS shares some more thoughts on that. But one of the key things about these concepts, which emerged in the 1950s, is that they’re highly theoretical, in both senses of the word. The real world isn’t as linear or as predictable as you expect. There are various ways that weakness can be turned into strength. And, as DS notes, the point of escalation dominance is to keep the weaker party from escalating at all. It’s supposed to be a framework of deterrence for the stronger power.