Early Halloween: Scary Like ICE
Hey, kids: Need a quick costume for Halloween? How about dressing up in an ICE outfit? You’ve got the mask, so no one can see who you are – and you can scare people, too. In fact, a federal judge has said that “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”
U.S. District Judge William Powell (appointed to the federal bench in 1985 by Ronald Reagan), ruling from his bench in Massachusetts, acknowledged that administration officials offered other justifications for masking. The judge didn’t buy them: “This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by [the ICE officers seized the Tufts graduate student, Rumesya Ozturk] for masking up and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable. . . . It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor — and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.”
Of course, masks are associated with bank robbers and racists in sheets. But people who aren’t desperados or Klansmen have masked for a variety other reasons. Beyond Halloween, think of ancient Greek and traditional Japanese drama, of the wooden masks Tlingits have used to tell stories and perform rituals. (The Encyclopedia Britannica says they’ve been worn all over the world since the Stone Age.)
Then, of course, people wear masks to protect themselves from Hockey pucks, baseballs, toxic fumes. Or from contracting or spreading, say COVID. That one turned out to be pretty controversial. It seems that real Americans don’t wear COVID masks. And until this year, when lung problems and cancers among young wildland firefighters made national headlines, the U.S. Forest Service believed that real firefighters didn’t mask up against wildfire smoke, either.
https://www.postalley.org/2025/10/23/early-halloween-hiding-ice/