The Trump administration is desperate to hide any record of state violence—all the way down to the identities of its federal agents.
The Chicago Sun-Times has identified four unmarked cars carrying federal agents—three of which had no license plates and one with only a back plate. Illinois law requires both front and back plates, with no exceptions for law enforcement or, in this case, roving bands of stochastic terrorists who enjoy harming immigrants.
But according to Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, that’s definitely nothing to be worried about.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
“To be clear: Our vehicles meet federal regulations for law enforcement,” she said.
No, she won’t say which regulations. No, she won’t answer any follow-up questions. Just trust her … regulations.
Ahead of the Trump administration’s siege of the city, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued an executive order barring law enforcement officers from wearing masks and requiring them to wear ID badges and activate body cameras during arrests.
Of course, Johnson—unlike President Donald Trump—understands that this order does not bind people who are not under his jurisdiction, so at best, he can only urge federal agents to comply.
Spoiler: They are not complying.
McLaughlin made the obligatory statement about how the “heroic law enforcement officers” have to wear masks or they will be murdered by Tren de Aragua, but they “clearly identify themselves as law enforcement.”
Perhaps McLaughlin could watch this video and explain how the heroic law enforcement officer in a plain white shirt, jeans, and a ski mask is identifiable as a member of law enforcement before he joins a bunch of other masked heroic guys dogpiling someone they dragged out of a car.
And, of course, if no one can identify your secret police, then really anyone can pretend to be your secret police—which is precisely what has happened.
CNN found two dozen examples of people posing as ICE officers in 2025—that’s more than every incident in the prior four presidential terms combined. The Trump administration has created a situation where you can never really know if you’re being accosted by an actual officer or just by someone who wants to rob you.
Federal officers hold down a protester in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago on Oct. 4.
And good luck avoiding those ICE agents—real or fake—as both Google and Apple have eagerly acquiesced to Trump’s demands to remove ICE-tracking apps.
Last week, Apple removed ICEblock, a free crowdsourcing app that allowed users to report ICE activity, from its app store. Gotta work in the shadows if you want to avoid any consequences.
It also removed Eyes Up, which didn’t have any location or tracking features but just archived videos of ICE’s lawlessness. So even knowing where ICE once was is somehow too dangerous.
DeICER, another ICE-tracking tool, is also gone, and the story behind that removal is bleak. The developer was told that posting information about ICE violated Apple’s ban of “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” directed at “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”
According to Apple, DeICER violated that rule because “its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
This is a gross warping of Apple’s own guidelines on hate speech, and it makes heavily armed and masked officers—who are literally terrorizing residents—a protected class in need of special protection.
So to recap: You can’t know what ICE drives. You can’t know who they are. You can’t know where they are. And now you can’t even know where they’ve been or what they’ve done.
Surely they have nothing to hide!
