The security video looked like a scene from an undercover sting operation against a 30-year-old Turkish graduate student in her white coat and backpack.
Rumeysa Ozturk was walking down a street in Somerville, Mass., on Tuesday when she was surrounded by federal agents wearing dark sweatshirts, some of their faces obscured by black masks. As they pulled off her backpack and handcuffed her, the terrified student let out a cry. One officer explained, “We’re the police.”
As the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts, critics say tourists, foreign students and other legal immigrants are being subjected to aggressive arrest tactics usually reserved for criminal suspects. They have been swarmed by teams of masked agents in masks, zip-tied and bundled into unmarked vehicles.
The tactics are not particularly new. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials declined to answer questions about tactics on Thursday, but former officials said federal immigration agents do wear street clothes to avoid giving away their presence before an arrest. They also can wear face coverings to avoid being singled out and doxxed online.
Deborah Fleischaker, a former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, said that plainclothes ICE agents have long been allowed to detain undocumented immigrants, though they are required to show their badges when making such arrests.
What is shifting are the targets — immigrants with valid visas and legal status. In Ms. Ozturk’s case, supporters say she appears to have merely been a co-author of an editorial in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s support for Israel.
“I think it’s a First Amendment violation,” Ms. Fleischaker said. “ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action. That’s not why you enforce.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said investigators with Homeland Security and ICE “found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. A visa is a privilege, not a right.” She did not offer evidence or details of that support.
Ms. Ozturk’s arrest this week is only the latest, and most public. In February, federal agents in bulky hoodies, who did not appear to have badges hanging from their necks, raided a taco truck in Memphis and arrested three undocumented Mexican workers.
A lawyer in New Britain, Conn., said he had been giving a Polish client a ride home from court last month when his car was boxed in by several pickup trucks and S.U.V.s. Federal agents in black ski masks leaped out, accused his client of overstaying a visa and arrested him for deportation, he said.
“I don’t know why they needed such a show of force,” said Adrian Baron, the lawyer. “It came off to me like political theater, a lot of overkill.”
In New York City, the wife of a pro-Palestinian protest leader frantically asked for the name of an agent arresting her husband, Mahmoud Khalil. She was told, “We don’t give our name.” The agents declined to say which agency they were with, and told Mr. Khalil’s wife only that her husband was being taken into immigration custody in downtown Manhattan.
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, said the images of masked immigration agents ricocheting around social media resembled the authoritarian governments that so many immigrants fled to come to the United States.
“I just can’t believe this is something our country is doing now,” she said.
Yet far from trying to downplay the aggressive tactics, the White House and immigration officials have celebrated them by trying to turn images of enforcement into deportation memes.
On Thursday, the White House posted a cartoon image of a handcuffed woman crying, an apparent mockery of a detainee who ICE officials said was a fentanyl trafficker arrested in Philadelphia. Last month, the administration put out what it called an “A.S.M.R. video” — a popular online video form that uses subtle sounds to stimulate pleasure — of people being shackled for a deportation flight.
It is increasingly difficult to determine which federal agents are conducting immigration arrests. President Trump has directed myriad federal agencies to assist ICE, including the Bureau of Prisons, the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The recent operations are reminiscent of those that took place in Portland, Ore., in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, when officers in tactical gear that street demonstrators did not recognize pulled protesters into unmarked vans and whisked them away. The videos of those tactics contributed to anger in the city — Oregon’s governor called it a “blatant abuse of power” — and led to a dramatic expansion in the protests that summer around Portland’s federal courthouse.
Enforcement operations by plainclothes agents are most likely to be increasingly visible under Mr. Trump. While the Biden administration directed ICE agents to only prioritize undocumented immigrants who posed a threat to national security, the Trump administration has ordered agents to target all of the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States — as well as students with legal visas who “create a ruckus for us,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it on Thursday.
Ms. Ozturk was detained under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which the Trump administration has also used to try to deport other students and academics with some form of legal status. The measure says that the secretary of state can initiate deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence in the United States is deemed a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said he would target students who participated in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests. Investigators from a branch of ICE that typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers, known as Homeland Security Investigations, have for weeks scoured the internet for social media posts and videos that the administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas, officials have said. The investigators handed over reports on multiple protesters to the State Department. Mr. Rubio then invoked the authority and authorized such arrests.
When an immigrant does lose legal status, including the loss of a student visa, Ms. Fleischaker, the former ICE official, said the immigration agency will typically send a letter informing the individual that he or she is now in the country illegally and give him or her a limited amount of time to leave, instead of immediately detaining the individual on the sidewalk.
“She didn’t even know she was out of status,” Ms. Fleischaker said of Ms. Ozturk. “This is not a person that we would normally use at-large enforcement against. At-large enforcement takes a lot of preparation and a lot of resources to go conduct at-large arrests.”
John Fabbricatore, a former director of ICE’s Denver field office, said that what agents wear during an arrest is a deliberate tactical decision.
Agents might wear clearly marked tactical vests and go in with guns drawn if they want to make a visible show of strength. But they put on street clothes — what Mr. Fabbricatore called “soft cover” — so as not to give away their presence before an arrest, or to avoid public blowback.
“As soon as people see ICE branding, they get in the way, they start protesting,” he said.
Mr. Fabbricatore said agents began wearing neck gaiters and masks during Mr. Trump’s first term in response to being publicly identified. He said critics had protested outside his own home, and that some agents were concerned their families could become targets.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama, said it was “not ideal” for immigration agents to wear masks during arrests or to obscure their identities as federal agents, in part because they could be mistaken for criminals themselves.
“It’s not normal in ICE operations that you’re wearing a mask,” he said. “But I understand why. I think there’s absolutely a threat to the officers and their privacy and their families.”
