Ice chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masks during arrest raids | US immigration

The US immigration chief and customs application (ICE) said on Sunday that he would continue to authorize the controversial practice of his officers carrying masks on their faces during their arrest raids.

While Donald Trump intensified his unprecedented efforts to expel immigrants across the country, ice officers have become notorious so that wearing masks approached and held people, often with force. Legal defenders and general prosecutors argued that he asked questions of responsibility and contributes to a climate of fear.

On Sunday, Todd Lyons, acting director of the agency, was questioned about CBS in the face of the nation about impostors operating the practice by passing for immigration agents. “This is one of our greatest concerns. And I said it publicly before, I am not a mask supporter,” said Lyons.

“However, if it is a tool that men and women of ice to keep safe and their families, then I allowed it.”

Lyons previously defended the practice of the stack of masks, saying to Fox News last week that “even if I am not a fan of masks, I think we could do better, but we must protect our agents and our officers”, claiming concerns about Doxxing (the public revealing personal information such as interior addresses) and declaring that the aggressions of immigration have increased to 830%.

While data from January 2024 to June 2024 show that 10 assaults reported against ice officers against 79 in the same period last year, these six months have also seen ice agents descend in record numbers, businesses, farms and public spaces, bringing together and mainly holding Latino as part of a massive advance of the Trump administration to get rid of the United States more than a million immigrants of each year.

The videos have flooded social media showing that ice agents carrying masks on their faces, holding people without identifying immediately, refusing to answer questions or explain why people are held and push them in unmarked cars with tinted windows.

“I sort of rejecting the criticism that they do not identify,” said Lyons. “The men and women of ice, and our MJ partners, and the local partners to apply the law that help us are identified on their vest.” The only identification that many agents wear is the marked body vest of the word “police”, although there are no police officers.

The interview was described as the first large network sit at the ICE headquarters in Washington.

Lyon also confirmed in the interview that the ice had obtained and uses Medicaid data to find immigrants who would be in the United States illegally, despite the undocumented people who were not eligible to receive Medicaid.

The whites represent the largest share of beneficiaries of Medicaid, at 39.6%.

A June Research Center report revealed that 84.2% of Medicaid beneficiaries were born in the United States, 6.6% are naturalized citizens and 9.2% are non-citizens born abroad authorized to be in the United States.

In addition to the tens of thousands of arrests, there have been several cases of masked criminals pretending to be ice officers, like a man from Raleigh, in North Carolina, accused in January of kidnapping and raping a woman, threatening to deport her if she does not be satisfied, or a man in Brooklyn, trying in February to violate a 51 -year -old woman. In April 2025, a woman from Florida pretended to be an immigration agent to briefly kidnap the woman of her ex-friend of her work.

Ice agents would also have overestimated assaults, as in the arrest of the candidate of the mayor of New York, Brad Lander, by immigration agents, where Lander was accused of aggression on the agents despite the accusations which were abandoned later in the day.

Critics say that the use of a mask allows ice agents to hide responsibility and avoid transparency of their actions.

“The use of masks is part of a panoply of legal questions presented by recent administration actions against immigrants and visitors (and certain citizens) but which may – and should – be immediately treated and corrected,” said New York City Bar Association in a press release.

A coalition of 21 state -of -the -art prosecutors, including Letitia James de New York, wrote to Congress last week, urging that it adopts legislation prohibiting “federal immigration agents to wear masks that hide their identity and oblige them to show their identification and their identification badge of the agency”. In California, state legislators proposed the non -vigilant law last month, which would oblige federal agents to provide identification, including their family name and badge or identification number.

“We have a Los Angeles police service which has to face crime in this city every day – and they are not hidden, and they stay here,” said the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, in a Sunday interview with ABC News.

“I don’t think you have the right to have a mask and to tear off people from the street.”