Are Trump's masked thugs the new Ku Klux Klan?

Masked, armed law enforcement agents who regularly violate the law and strip people of their constitutional rights is nothing new in America. They have, in fact, a long and well-documented history, including states — after years of abuse by masked men — passing laws specifically to prevent them from concealing their identities when performing law enforcement operations.

In this era, we call them Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. In the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries they called themselves the Klu Klux Klan. They often operated with the blessing of both federal and state governments, often deputized and given badges and guns, and “enforced the law” while wearing their famous white hoods to conceal their individual identities.

ICE operates today with a level of anonymity, impunity, and intimidation that closely parallels the Ku Klux Klan’s tactics as masked, semi-official enforcers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities, and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.

Because their violence and brutality so often broke the law, the Klan’s hoods prevented victims from identifying them. This allowed them to operate with near-complete impunity, knowing that individually they’d never be held to account.

To this day, we generally only know the names of their public leaders or of those who’d taken over regular law enforcement bureaus, like the five Klan members who murdered three voting registration/civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.

Operating under the authority of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s office, Edgar Ray Killen, a local Ku Klux Klan organizer, planned and orchestrated the murders; Cecil Ray Price, a Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff and Klansman, arrested the three men on a fabricated speeding charge; Alton Wayne Roberts was the Klansman who shot and killed Schwerner and Goodman; Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s Klan, ordered the killings; James Jordan was the Klansman who confessed to shooting Chaney.

Today — to avoid the accountability that Killen, Price, Roberts, Bowers, and Jordan faced — ICE agents routinely conduct operations while masked, concealing faces and badge numbers. This is framed as a “safety” measure, but it’s pretty clear that the real motive is to shield agents from accountability, mirroring practices by the Klan, who wore hoods to intimidate, avoid arrest, and facilitate mob violence without risk of personal consequence.

The Klan’s power was rooted in violence without accountability. And the mask was its shield. When historians write about the so-called “Second Klan” of the 1920s, they point out its members’ obsession with law and order and masked morality enforcement.

Some jurisdictions openly deputized them to “assist” in enforcing segregation laws and even liquor laws — principally raiding Black-owned speakeasies — during Prohibition. In Indiana and Oregon, the Klan effectively ran the entire state’s politics.

Eventually, states had enough and outlawed Klan members from wearing hoods or kerchiefs, even when executing the law. New York, a “free state,” was an early adopter. In 1845, before the Klan was formed, the state made it a crime for a law enforcement officer or anybody else to appear “disguised and armed.”

An Indiana version of that law was overturned by an Indiana Federal District judge who found that forcing Klan members to remove their hoods could subject them to harassment and impinge on their “right to anonymity when past harassment makes it likely that disclosing the members’ [identities] would impact the group’s ability to pursue its collective efforts at advocacy.”

It’s Tom Homan and Kristi Noem’s argument today.

In addition to New York and Indiana, 17 states passed laws against armed men wearing masks to conceal their identities, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Oklahoma, Texas, Connecticut, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee (law later struck down), Arkansas (local ordinances), and Maryland (various forms).

California has an 1872 ordinance that outlaws “mask, false whiskers, or any personal disguise (whether complete or partial)” when “evading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification in the commission of any public offense.”

Connecticut law (1949) makes it illegal to wear a mask “with the intent” to deprive another of “any rights, privileges or immunities” on account of race, something it appears that ICE officers are doing daily, particularly since Brett Kavanaugh said they can racially profile people in so-called “Kavanaugh Raids.”

Delaware outlaws (1953) wearing masks “while congregating in public and depriving another of rights.” DC outlaws wearing masks “to avoid identification” while committing a dangerous or violent crime, theft, or “threats to do bodily harm.”

Florida outlaws (1951) wearing a mask “while intimidating others.” Ditto for Georgia, Massachusetts (“while obstructing police”), Michigan (“in commission of a crime”), New Mexico (“while obstructing police”), North Dakota (“while in commission of a crime”), Ohio (“while in commission of a misdemeanor with others so masked”), and Oklahoma (“while in commission of a crime or to harass”).

Most of these laws could be used to prosecute ICE officers when they wear masks while committing assault, kidnapping, and vandalism, should any state or city governments choose to make the arrests.

The most recent and most specific law was passed this year by California’s legislature, called the No Secret Police Act (SB627). It’s main author, State Senator Scott Weiner, notes:

“As this authoritarian regime seeks to demolish our constitutional rights and engages in a straight up terror campaign, California is meeting the Trump Administration’s secret police tactics with strength and defiance. …
“ICE’s secret police tactics, under Trump and Stephen Miller, are raining fear and aggression down on California and requiring us to adapt in real time. …

“No one wants masked officers roaming their communities and kidnapping people with impunity. As this authoritarian regime expands its reach into every aspect of daily life — including terrorizing people where they work, where they live, where they go to school, where they shop, where they seek health care — California will continue to stand for the rule of law and for basic freedoms.”

So far, Governor Gavin Newsom has chosen not to enforce the law that he pushed through his own legislature, although ICE seems to be focusing their “Kavanaugh Raid” abuses of Black and Hispanic people on Chicago — where they’ve already shot two people, killing one — and Portland right now.

The question isn’t whether ICE agents today share the Klan’s ideology. Some may not, although recruiting pitches seem directed toward those sympathetic. The question, instead, is whether our government has once again created a Klan-like system in which anonymous armed men can break into homes, detain people, and abuse families without being individually answerable to the law.

That is what the hood and mask have always symbolized in America: they mean rightwing thugs can do whatever they want and walk away untouched, no matter how heinous their crimes.

We’re told that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. But when armed officers of the government hide their identities from the public they claim to serve, they’re telling us exactly what to fear.

History has already written the first draft of this story once before. We’d be fools to let it play out again.