ICE Claims Agents Need to Wear Masks Due to Assaults. Here’s the Truth

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have claimed multiple times since May that there’s been a 413 percent increase in assaults against their agents to justify their officers wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves. The data states otherwise.

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump penned a column asserting the obvious—ICE officers are covering their faces and wearing plainclothes while they kidnap people off the street to “avoid accountability” and make it “harder to say precisely who had plucked up a college student or local mother and sent them to jail in another state.”

Bump first raised the question in May in an article that had acting ICE Director Todd Lyons so incensed that he wrote a letter to the editor claiming a staggering increase in assaults, writing “officers wear masks for personal protection and to prevent doxing.… Since President Donald Trump returned to office, ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”

The use of a percentage here is very intentional, as it’s easier to inflate and sensationalize. “A 413 percent increase could mean that the number of assaults went from 200 in 2024 to 1,026 in 2025—or that it went from eight to 41.… There’s a big difference between an increase of 826 assaults and an increase of 33—especially if some of those ‘assaults’ are of the Lander variety,” wrote Bump, who dug into the claim in a piece published Thursday.

Bump found that assaults on agents had decreased every month since 2024 and, despite repeated requests to ICE, wasn’t given any proof of ICE agents being doxxed, targeted, or assaulted outside the context of an immigration arrest.

The organization that has conducted countless raids and crackdowns, kidnapped innocent people off the street, and handcuffed elected officials, is now trying to frame itself as the victim so that its officers can continue to feel big and strong behind the anonymity of their masks.

“We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. That the organization would not provide evidence for its claims … diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt,” Bump wrote. “Leaving the question I posed in May: Why are these officers covering their faces if not to avoid accountability?”