One of the more chilling and underreported developments of the past four years has been the Trump administration’s employment of unidentified federal officers to threaten, intimidate, attack, and arrest lawful protesters. Often heavily armed, these steroid-bulked goons with no personal identification were dispatched last June, for example, to intimidate protesters in Washington, D.C. When asked to identify themselves, these people would vaguely attribute their presence to the “Department of Justice,” “the federal government,” or some other generic nonresponse without disclosing their direct origins.
The $740 billion National Defense Authorization bill (NDAA) drafted by the U.S. House and Senate last week—and currently awaiting Donald Trump’s signature—contains a provision requiring federal law enforcement officers policing civil protests to wear visible identification, including personal identifiers and the name the organization to whom they belong.
In a June 3 story, Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman described an encounter he had with some such unidentified individuals while reporting on protests against police violence in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
I asked two men who they were with. “We’re with the Department of Justice,” one answered. “Are you with a specific agency?” I asked. “Are you regular DOJ employees or just detailed there?” He responded: “We’re with the Department of Justice” to all my questions. He asked me who I was with, which I was happy to share, and why I wanted to know, which I’d hoped was obvious: This is America. We are supposed to know who’s policing us.
After Friedman reached out to the Department of Justice, a spokesman claimed the officers were from the Bureau of Prisons. The prison guards, dispatched as “riot control,” also declined to admit whether they had been instructed to hide their identities.
Officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were also deployed in response to protests in Portland. According to several reports, these militarized agents actively detained, searched, and held several protesters without any stated or identified probable cause, without specifically identifying themselves, and, in some cases, without explaining the reason for the arrest or detention. Neither the presence nor the intervention of these roving, unidentifiable law enforcement squads had been requested by state or local government officials. DHS confirmed, in fact, that their agents were operating out of unmarked vehicles.
As reported by Friedman for Mother Jones on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Chris Murphy introduced language drawn from prior proposed legislation into the NDAA, requiring that federal law enforcement deployed to protests bear some form of personal identification.
The 4,500-page annual defense policy bill that emerged from a House-Senate policy committee Thursday requires any armed forces personnel, including National Guard members, and federal law enforcement agents who respond to a “civil disturbance”, to display either their name or some other “individual identifier”, as well as the organization or branch of the Armed Forces for whom they work.
According to a statement from Schumer, the measure was intended to require transparency and accountability from law enforcement. This is a direct response to the military-style deployments ordered by Donald Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr against peaceful protesters—deployments that “treated American citizens like they were an enemy.” The original provision, which has now been amended, mandated that the actual name of the individual be displayed. That provision was compromised as the bill was being crafted, and the name requirement is now optional. Visible badge number information or other personal identifiers can be substituted. Undercover officers, and those agencies who do not normally wear uniforms, are also exempted.
As noted by Rachel Brown and Coleman Saunders writing for Lawfare, local police this past summer often covered their badge numbers in order to avoid being positively identified.
In several cities, including Seattle, New York and Chicago, individuals also reported that a few police officers deployed to the protests covered their badge numbers with tape. Such obfuscation has been widely criticized, even by city officials. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot stated that the officers who refused to identify themselves “forfeited the right to be Chicago police officers,” although she would not have the final say about whether to discipline the officers.
As Sen. Murphy noted, in tweets highlighted in Friedman’s article, while the original language was preferred, the current language still provides individual accountability.
Trump has balked at signing the NDAA (a refusal that is generally unprecedented in modern history) on other grounds, specifically its failure to include a wholly unrelated provision favored by aggrieved right-wing groups that would subject social media platforms to liability for the content of materials posted on them. Since neither the House nor Senate appear particularly interested in delaying the bill over this contrived Section 230 issue, it seems likely that Trump will either cave on signing the bill—or face the practical certainty of a veto override.