On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson took time away from trying to defend President Donald Trump’s catastrophic “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” to dismiss Americans’ concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents masking their identities while detaining immigrants.
“From the people who mandated mask-wearing for years in America, it's absurd. They need to back off of ICE and respect their agents and stop protesting against them,” Johnson told reporters as he walked briskly through the halls of the U.S. Capitol.
When asked if he was concerned about faceless armed agents refusing to identify themselves when arresting immigrants, Johnson replied, “Why? So that they can target them so they can put their names and faces online and dox them? That's what these activists do.”
Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, has defended agents using masks to hide their identities.
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” he said.
After years of attacking mask-wearing as weak and fearful, Trump and the GOP have fully embraced mask mandates—at least for ICE agents.
To recap: masks as a public health measure during the coronavirus pandemic, which conservatively claimed 1.23 million Americans’ lives, were symbolic of a nefarious plan to control Americans. But masks as a way for ICE agents to anonymously detain and deport people illegally is totally okay.
The Trump administration’s deportation efforts have been a civil liberties nightmare, with public officials being detained and ICE agents bypassing due process in a shoot-first ask-questions-later strategy of intimidation. During the pandemic, ICE even tried to skip the line for scarce masks that were meant for frontline workers.
While some things change, GOP hypocrisy remains the same.
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