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Los Angeles’s mayor said Sunday that masked immigration agents helped create a “reign of terror.” ICE’s director said agents could wear masks to “keep them and their families safe.”
July 20, 2025, 5:51 p.m. ET
Immigration raids by masked federal agents have helped create a “reign of terror” in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass said in an interview aired Sunday on ABC.
Fear of arrest and deportation has prompted many of Southern California’s immigrants — no matter their legal status — to hunker down in their homes, missing work, forgoing church services and skipping milestones like children’s graduations. And Ms. Bass said the practice some Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have adopted of obscuring their faces with black masks makes a menacing encounter even more frightening.
“These masked men pull up in unmarked cars and jump out of the cars with rifles and detain people,” Ms. Bass said in a separate interview on Sunday on CBS. “For the average citizen, it looks like it’s a violent kidnapping. You should never have that.”
Earlier this month, 14 Democratic senators said in a letter to Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, that agents grabbing people off the street while masked and in plain clothes “represents a clear attempt to compound” the “fear and chaos” of immigration raids and “avoid accountability for agents’ actions.”
Mr. Lyons said in an interview Sunday on CBS that he did not encourage agents to use masks but would continue to let them wear them in the field “if that’s a tool they need to keep them and their families safe.”
Federal officials say the face coverings help protect ICE agents from being doxxed, or having personal details like a home address or contact information shared online.
