A federal judge in Massachusetts stunned observers on Tuesday with a scathing 161-page rebuke of President Donald Trump's administration for terrorizing noncitizen students for exercising their free speech rights to protest the Israeli occupation of Gaza. At various points, he criticized the administration's assault on basic constitutional rights and even addressed someone who sent his court a threatening message to deter a ruling against Trump.
But Judge Bill Young, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, did something more than that, noted CBS justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane: he went out of his way to compare Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the infamous white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, noting both groups use masks to hide their identities and spread fear more effectively.
The Trump administration has claimed that ICE agents' controversial practice of wearing masks is to protect officers' safety — an idea that Young thoroughly rejected.
"This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by [Rümeysa] Öztürk’s captors for masking-up and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE," wrote Young. "It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. 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," wrote Young. "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."
Young concluded this thought with a quote from former President Abraham Lincoln's second annual message to Congress in 1862: “We can not escape history ... [It] will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
The judge is not alone in his criticism; many law enforcement experts have condemned the use of masks in immigration raids and arrests, with retired police chief and Brown University professor Brandon del Pozo saying, "I never for a second thought of hiding my face from the public, hiding my face from the people I policed. Nor did any cop that I knew and worked with. And we were proud that we had the courage to do our jobs that way."