In July, President Trump and Congressional Republicans rammed through a sweeping budget bill that invests over $100 billion in ICE and border enforcement. In recent months, ICE agents — often masked, wearing plain clothes, and without anything to outwardly identify them as agents — have escalated their campaign of terror on immigrant communities at the direction of this administration, worsened after Trump rescinded policies that once restricted immigration enforcement in locations like domestic violence shelters, hospitals, and churches. Predictably, all of this has resulted in chaos and devastating state-inflicted violence — and a chilling rise in civilian violence against women.
A letter from the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC) addressed to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials, which was shared with HuffPost, alleges that civilian men are impersonating ICE agents to kidnap and sexually assault immigrant women. It wouldn’t be difficult to do as ICE agents increasingly wear plain clothes, conceal their faces to avoid accountability, and are not required to wear paraphernalia to identify themselves as officers. ICE has also directed its agents to detain undocumented people they encounter incidentally, even if the agents don’t have an arrest warrant.
The allegations are horrifying: A North Carolina man has been accused of posing as an ICE agent, threatening to deport an immigrant woman, then kidnapping and raping her; police in New York are searching for a man suspected of posing as an ICE agent, assaulting and trying to rape a woman, before robbing her and fleeing the scene in broad daylight.
“All our lives, we are taught to fear masked men in unmarked vehicles,” the DWC wrote in an August letter to the administration. “We learn we should run from such men to avoid being kidnapped, sexually assaulted, or killed. Yet, ICE is increasingly conducting raids and arrests in masks, plain clothes, without visible identification or badges, using unmarked vehicles — tactics that cause confusion, terror, and mistrust among the public.”
Lawmakers in the California legislature and in Congress have introduced legislation to address horrific scenarios like these, by requiring ICE agents to have proper identification and prohibit them from covering their faces. This could be a step in the right direction.
But we can’t bury the deeper, driving forces behind why this is happening. This phenomenon is only possible because of the outsized power that state agents — ICE, police officers, prison staff — have always had to abuse and control women and victims’ bodies. Civilians are impersonating state agents to assault vulnerable women and victims because state agents — under every presidential administration — have always been able to do this.
The reason civilians would even think to pose as state agents to get away with sexual violence is that, nationwide, state power in a range of forms is routinely wielded to perpetrate gender-based violence. Unmasking ICE agents is important, but it’s a Band-Aid on a broader, systemic crisis.
