Why Trump wants ICE to ditch the masks at airports

There is no war in American cities, but masked men shrouded in anonymity, carrying battle weapons and decked out in combat gear, have been hunting down immigrants across the country for nearly a year. In the process, they’ve shot and killed US citizens and terrorized immigrant families. Their tunnel vision of violence has helped the Trump administration manufacture a theater of war where none exists.

But there are limits to this roaming performance, and those limits are now becoming apparent at American airports.

“I am a BIG proponent of ICE wearing masks as they search for, and are forced to deal with, hardened criminals, many of whom were let into our Country by Sleepy Joe Biden,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I would greatly appreciate, however, NO MASKS, when helping our Country out of the Democrat caused MESS at the airports, etc.”

The president’s sartorial advice came as ICE agents deployed to airports on Monday, a strategy Trump insists will help TSA agents—who are not getting paid, while the ICE officers now hovering around them are—as they struggle with massive security caused by the partial government shutdown. (Shout out to “Linda from Arizona” for the idea.) When asked about ICE agents dropping the masks, Trump told reporters that airports don’t tend to see “murderers, killers, and drug dealers.”

“I didn’t think it was an appropriate look for an airport,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very appropriate look when they’re out on the street trying to find one of the 11,888 murderers that Sleepy Joe Biden let into the country.” He then insisted that a side benefit of that arrangement would be that ICE agents could now arrest undocumented immigrants entering the country. “It’s very fertile territory,” Trump said.

In essence, the president was admitting to the outsized role that aesthetics have played as ICE terrorizes communities across the country. It’s this blend of violence and optics he clearly wants to keep from a certain class of Americans. These, apparently, are not the folks that Trump wants to expose to ICE’s campaign of violence, abuse, and harassment—at least not firsthand.

Of course, that same logic has forced the people Trump hates—immigrant communities and residents of blue cities—to see ICE and the Border Patrol’s masked terror front and center with maximum visibility. As journalist Radley Balko told me in January:

“This administration sees all of that as a benefit. They want to terrorize immigrant communities. They want to be seen as an occupying force. They’ve been clear about this. They want to make immigrant communities so fearful that they’ll self-deport, and they’ll tell others to stop coming here. Making immigration officers as scary and intimidating as possible is part of the strategy.”

By calling on ICE officers to drop the masks, Trump appears to understand, even narrowly, the inherent theater of his mass deportation agenda. But like ICE’s theater of war, which uses optics to inflict real violence, it seems like a matter of time before trouble will start at airports. After all, these are poorly trained federal agents, not trained in aviation security, and yet stationed at airport security lines to mill about. This time, though, we might actually know what they look like.