For weeks, unidentifiable men and women wearing neck gaiters, mismatched camouflage attire, gloves and baseball caps have stood outside hearing rooms at the federal immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan. They block stairwells and elevators, waiting for immigrants to leave mandatory court appointments, before handcuffing them and taking them to processing centers. Family members may wait days before finding out where their loved ones are being held — or if they’re even still in the country.

As U.S. immigration officials seek to arrest more than a million people this year, an army of plainclothes law enforcement agents has dispersed across the country. They arrive in unmarked vehicles while only their eyes peek out from a balaclava. Their bulletproof vests may identify them as “police” or a “federal agent” but often offer no hint as to their agency or division. They arrest workers at grocery stores and car washes and detain people near churches. They’ve been recorded smashing a car window to detain an asylum seeker, blamed for breaking doors and accused of intimidating reporters.

For undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, the specter of an arrest lurks behind every trip outside. For people in these communities, the fear of being quickly deported is now accompanied by a new concern: that they may be kidnapped by individuals pretending to be law enforcement officers.

Legal experts, federal legislators and immigration activists told Truthout that by concealing their identities, immigration enforcement personnel have created fertile ground for impersonators to endanger the general public by posing as law police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

“It’s creating a lot of fear, of not knowing who these people are, of suddenly people approaching you to tell you and asking your name and your immigration status on the screen when they don’t even have identification,” Rufina Reyes, the director of Washington-based grassroots organization La Resistencia, told Truthout while speaking through an interpreter. “Without any ID, without anything that can accredit them that they are legitimate, we could be exposed to a possible kidnapping, and that’s basically what’s happening.”

In February, a South Carolina man was charged with kidnapping, impersonating a law enforcement officer and other crimes after video footage emerged of him confronting a Latino driver and telling the man he was going to be sent back to Mexico. In April, a man was arrested in Florida after allegedly pulling in front of a vehicle and demanding the identification and immigration status of two men. The same month, a Florida woman was arrested after allegedly kidnapping her ex-boyfriend’s wife while wearing a t-shirt that said “ICE,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and covering her face with a mask. In early June, a man posing as an ICE agent in Philadelphia reportedly robbed an automobile shop, zip-typing a woman in the process and saying that he “was going to take undocumented employees into custody.” Less than a week later, a man allegedly disguised as law enforcement fatally shot Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, her husband and their dog.

In recent weeks, immigration officers’ deployment of face coverings has emerged as a focus for legislators across various levels of government, who have argued that their widespread use allows immigration personnel to act as an unaccountable secret police force. As agencies including the FBI and IRS assist with immigration enforcement operations, legal rights organizations have argued that the inability to identify agents poses problems for oversight.

“We would normally be trying to follow a paper trail and verify that paper trail against what we actually see happening on ground, and can’t do that if you don’t even know who is who is doing what,” Naureen Shah, director of government affairs for the equality division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Truthout.

In response, Democrats have begun introducing bills to ensure that federal immigration agents are clearly identifiable.

“We need to bring a national standard to ICE agents, and we need to bring transparency and accountability,” Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-New York), told Truthout. Velázquez introduced federal legislation in June to prohibit ICE agents from wearing facial coverings and mandate that agents have clothes displaying their name and affiliation with ICE while making arrests. “If we accept, as Americans, this kind of secrecy and abuse against immigrants, it’s only a matter of time before it is used against American citizens too.”

That has already happened.

On July 2, the ACLU of Southern California and other legal organizations filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of immigration raids around Los Angeles. The legal claim noted that “numerous U.S. citizens who work, reside, or just happen to be in neighborhoods with large numbers of people of color” are “also getting swept up.” The same day, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund demanded the federal government pay $1 million in damages to a U.S. citizen who was detained by federal immigration officers at a Home Depot.

For years, legal organizations have argued that the deceptive tactics used by ICE agents to make arrests violate the Fourth Amendment. ICE agents have long represented themselves as local police officers or pretended to be delivery workers by carrying fake business emblems, according to training materials obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project in 2014. The organization has said that ICE’s use of ruses has escalated since 2017.

But historians and law enforcement experts say the current omnipresent use of face coverings is a departure from longstanding practices by federal law enforcement conducting immigration operations.

Despite the legal efforts to rein in their tactics, ICE personnel have vast authority. They can conduct arrests without a warrant. They can carry out operations in areas of private businesses that are considered publicly accessible, like a restaurant dining area. They don’t have to offer badge numbers or names, though they are supposed to identify themselves as an “immigration officer” after an arrest is made.

From California to New York, stories have emerged of agents refusing to state their agency affiliation while carrying out operations. In June, footage emerged of ICE agents on Long Island detaining a Hispanic U.S. citizen. Elzon Lemus, who was pulled over while driving to work, said that the agents refused to say what agency they represented even as he sat handcuffed on the street. On the other side of the country, ICE personnel arrested U.S. citizen Andrea Velez, accusing her of assaulting a federal officer. Velez said that she did not assault an officer and was racially profiled, and that the people who arrested her didn’t identify themselves.

These tactics prompted furious outcry from Democratic politicians, who have compared ICE’s actions to those used by authoritarian regimes and extremist groups. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that she “will never accept these unlawful and chaotic raids.” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu compared ICE agents to NSC-131, a New England-based neo-Nazi group. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Donald Trump was using federal immigration officers as a “modern-day Gestapo.”

“The KKK would mask themselves,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-New York) told Truthout during a phone call.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE have balked at these comparisons and framed calls to unmask agents as attempts to endanger the lives of the armed federal officers that rove in large groups. Agency officials have argued that facial coverings help protect officers.

“Every day the men and women of ICE put their lives on the line to protect and defend the lives of American citizens. Make no mistake, Democrat politicians like Hakeem Jeffries, Mayor Wu of Boston, Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor [Karen] Bass of Los Angeles are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an email sent to Truthout via a spokesperson. “From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi gestapo to glorifying rioters, the violent rhetoric of these sanctuary politicians is despicable. This violence against ICE must end.”

In response to a query sent by Truthout, the agency claimed that assaults against ICE law enforcement have risen 700 percent, but did not provide details about how that figure was calculated or how many people have been charged for the alleged assaults. They also did not say if instances like the arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander — who was arrested in June and accused of assaulting a law enforcement official after he tried to escort a migrant past agents seeking to detain him — counted toward that number. Others have noted that an increase in confrontations between officers and protesters is not surprising given the dramatic rise in encounters between ICE and the public under the Trump administration as officers seek to conduct 3,000 arrests per day to meet.

Civil rights experts, immigrant advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers told Truthout these arguments don’t hold water and view such statements as justifications for an immigration enforcement apparatus set on drastically expanding the scope of its authority.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has dramatically expanded the scope of immigration enforcement practices by deporting people to countries where they have no ties, refusing to communicate with local police agencies ahead of enforcement actions, ignoring court orders, ramping up arrests of people without criminal convictions, detaining green card holders and cancelling bond hearings for immigrants who arrive in the U.S. illegally, meaning they will be detained for the entirety of court proceedings.

Set against this backdrop, the unidentifiable immigration agents are just another symbol of a government agency that wants to act with unchecked power.

The masking “represents the normalization of a class of federal agents, a class of law enforcement that has even more impunity to operate as it wishes in communities,” Emanuel Gomez Gonzalez, a member of Durham, North Carolina- based immigrant-rights nonprofit Siembra NC, which helps people understand their legal rights, told Truthout. “If we are asking people to record interactions, but the officer never identifies themselves, there is never any way to hold them accountable for actions that they’re captured committing that are apparent violations of constitutional rights.”

That lack of accountability has been fostered for decades, Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, told Truthout.

“This deportation machine was created by the Democrats. Beginning with Clinton, the Democrats created massive investments in harsher legal frameworks, massive expansions of the resources for border enforcement, [and] a rhetorical acceptance of the deportations,” Vitale said. “Obama oversaw the highest levels of deportations in the nation’s history, and then Trump inherits that and further ramps it up. They’re all throwing up their arms like, oh my god, fascism just fell from the sky.”

New legislative efforts to rein in ICE’s authority will face both the political challenge of getting passed and the practical question of whether federal agents would adhere to new restrictions on their conduct.

Even so, those legislative efforts are occurring at the local, state, and federal level. In California, two state lawmakers introduced legislation to prohibit most law enforcement officials from covering their faces and mandate that they be identifiable by their uniform.

Alex Marthews, the national chair of anti-surveillance group Restore the Fourth, told Truthout that his organization has been working with lawmakers in Massachusetts municipalities to pass ordinances that would require ICE officers to show proof of their agency affiliation and identity when asked by local police.

Such legislation could be “really powerful,” said Naureen Shah of the ACLU.

“People who are in law enforcement do not want to be scrutinized by the public,” Shah said. “So if you are law enforcement who doesn’t want to be questioned about what you’re doing, you may be less likely to show up at a city if they are asking people for ID.”

In addition to the legislation introduced by Velázquez, Representatives Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, introduced another piece of legislation that would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to require that DHS officers show their faces, identify which component of DHS they work for, and wear official insignia. On July 8, two Democratic senators released legislation that would require ICE agents to display their agency affiliation and badge number or name. Such legislation is virtually certain to stall with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, a fact Velázquez acknowledged during her call with Truthout. House Speaker Mike Johnson has scoffed at the suggestion that ICE agents should be identifiable.

Even so, skeptics have viewed the proposals as weak efforts to rein in ICE’s authority. The bill proposed by Velázquez would permit DHS to determine disciplinary action for officers who are deemed to have unnecessarily concealed their identity, while the legislation introduced by Goldman and Espaillat did not specify how agents could be punished.

Vitale referred to these legislative efforts as “accountability theater” and argued they suffer from a more significant problem: merely requiring that law enforcement personnel are identifiable does little to curtail abuses of power.

“The problem here is that people are stuck in a fantasy of liberal legal formalism that imagines that police are accountable to the public, but this is a fantasy people labor under that causes them to produce these completely naive and unrealistic ideas about police accountability,” Vitale said. “Even if you knew the identity of a federal agent who you believe is engaged in misconduct, there’s still no effective remedy for that.”