The tension over masked federal immigration agents expanded on Long Island, where police officers are now permitted to mask up — but no one else is.
Although we are five years out of the Covid pandemic’s most desperate hours, debates about masking have clung to their fiery place in the culture wars. The context has shifted — from public health emergency to campus protests over Gaza to immigration raids on Home Depot parking lots. But the various arguments, deeply politicized, remain entrenched in a single question: Whose personal liberties ought to be sacrosanct?
In the past few weeks there has been an expansion into new territory, perhaps the most contentious of which pits the rights of law enforcement against anyone immigration agents and police officers deems suspicious. Less than a year after signing into law the Mask Transparency Act, a statute more or less banning face coverings in the western half of Long Island, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican Nassau County executive, amended it via an executive order, creating an exception that allows police officers to wear masks on duty.
This was necessary, he maintained, to ensure the safety of those executing the raids, as well as officers’ family members, who might be sought out and threatened. He signed the order the same day that the Department of Homeland Security issued a news release asserting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., had been subject to a surge of assaults after their personal information was publicized.
Objectors to Mr. Blakeman’s move pointed to an inherent contradiction. By allowing police officers to wear masks on the job, the law gives them the freedom to conceal their identities while they are rounding up immigrants who (at least on parts of Long Island) are prohibited from wearing them. It permits officers, as Beth Haroules, a staff lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, put it, to act as both “sword and shield.”
The N.Y.C.L.U. is already suing Nassau County over the warm relationship it has maintained with the Trump administration in regard to immigrant detention. The explicit partnership, lawyers argue, undermines Fourth Amendment protections regarding searches, seizures and privacy. The mask exemption has only amplified these concerns, given that it brings local police closer in appearance and style to ICE agents, who are now arresting 500 percent more noncriminal immigrants than they were eight years ago.
And to what end, all this ominous camouflage? For years, local governments have been striving to strengthen the relationship between the police and the constituents they are meant to safeguard, to refashion law enforcement as less intimidating, not more. “People are concerned about community policing and the relationships we’ve built with our officers,” Seth Koslow, a county legislator and Democrat who is running to replace Mr. Blakeman, told me. “Nassau County police officers are fantastic, and the ICE agents are coming in and eroding that trust. We’ve worked very hard to get here. And now we’re going backward.”
