If you knew who they are, they would not be safe.
That is how Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar, defended masked immigration agents on Sunday.
It wasn’t the first time that has happened, but it was stated so bluntly, that I stopped the clip when I heard it the first time and went back to listen to it again.
Ed O’Keefe on CBS’s Face the Nation was asking Homan about the Democrats’ minimal demands for immigration enforcement changes in connection with funding the Department of Homeland Security. O’Keefe summarized the requests as follows:
They center around some specific policy changes Democrats demand in how immigration agents conduct operations. Among other things, they’d like to require immigration agents to show identification, wear body cameras, take off their masks, stop racial profiling, and seek judicial warrants to enter private property.
Homan, after disclaiming his involvement in negotiations, said:
[W]hen they say stop racial profiling, that’s just not occurring. I mean, ICE will detain, briefly detain and question somebody – question somebody based on reasonable suspicion. It has nothing to do with racial profiling.
As far as the masks, look, you know, I don’t like the masks either, but because threats against ICE officers, you know, are up over 1500 percent, actual assaults, and threats are up over 8000 percent, these men and women have to protect themselves. As far as identifying themselves, they all have placards identifying themselves as ICE, ERO, HSI, DEA, FBI.So they all have placards on them.
So I will let the White House and members of Congress, you know, fight that out. But I think some of the asks are just — I think they’re unreasonable, because there is no racial profiling. There is identifying marks.
Virtually every word out of his mouth was a lie. And not new. Most of this line of argument is so old that Philip Bump was still at The Washington Post debunking it in an earlier iteration last summer. And the rest is just a watered-down, as-best-as-Homan-can-explain-it Kavanaugh stops excuse that has been proven to be false nearly daily since the justice wrote his words to justify the stops.
And yet, when O’Keefe tried to interrupt Homan’s filibuster to make a point, Homan summed up his arguments — and the Trump administration — with a bang:
[T]he masks right now are for officer safety reasons.
This was stated as an explanation, as a justification, as an argument for masks.
In reality, it is a deep admission of the fundamental moral failing at the base of the Trump administration’s lawless actions.
If you knew what the administration is doing, it would not be sustainable.
If a government’s actions in a democracy require masks — if the people being governed in that democracy cannot know who is acting — that is a problem with what the government is doing, not with the governed.
In fact, outside of the second Trump administration, I can really only think of two other instances where the government so fastidiously protects anonymity: The death chamber and the shadow docket.
The exceptions really do prove the rule.
The second Trump administration, in contrast, is constantly seeking to act in secrecy. The less we, the public know, the happier they are. The reasons are obvious: They know how unpopular their actions are. They know this is unsustainable. They know what they are doing is wrong.
Most importantly: They know that secrecy is essential to preventing accountability.
The Trump administration is currently on its fourth effort currently to stop members of Congress from visiting immigration detention facilities without advance notice, a topic I’ve been covering here at Law Dork.
The Trump administration is disappearing data. Earlier this month, Shifra Dayak and Anna Kramer at NOTUS reported, “Researchers estimate that well over 3,000 data sets have been removed from public access.“
Specific to immigration, the Trump administration has been issuing internal memos, altering the government’s interpretation of and enforcement of federal immigration laws (and the Constitution) repeatedly — unilateral changes that are sometimes not known to the public until months later.
Just Saturday night, Pranav Baskar and Hamed Aleaziz at The New York Times reported on yet another secret agreement the Trump administration has apparently reached with a foreign country to receive people the U.S. is wishing to deport. This time it is Cameroon, and the Times reports that nine people — not from Cameroon — were sent there in January after the government was blocked from sending the people to their own countries. This echoes when the Trump administration sent people to Ghana under similar circumstances five months ago, raising refoulement questions covered here at Law Dork at the time.
And, of course, there are the masks — the physical manifestation of the soullessness of the Trump administration.
If their faces are hidden, it is more difficult for the public to hold those public employees — people being paid with taxpayers’ money — accountable for their actions.
Although the claimed need for masks is unjustified on its own terms, the lack of justification becomes all the more clear when you step back and realize that is just part and parcel of what this administration is seeking to do on all fronts: Prevent accountability by hiding, erasing, or eliminating information.
For those who don’t know what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories and cases open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of those I was unable to cover during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.
This Sunday, these are the tabs that I am closing:
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