ICE, ICE, Criminal: The FBI Misses The Actual Problem

Note the lack of visible badges. Or warrants. Or cause.
_{image credit “ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS” from The Marshall Project}

So, the FBI wants ICE (and presumably other federal masked marauders as well) to identify themselves properly so we can tell them apart from the criminals.

Yeah; that’s not gonna work.

I mean, sure, part of the problem is that ICE (and CBP, and whatever else?) goons are wandering around with hidden faces and no visible identification.

That certainly does make it difficult to identify them as police, since that’s not how legitimate police dress for work.

Not even in the United States, where “visible identification” is allowed to be so small that you can’t even see it from a few feet away much less actually read it.

So fair enough, as far as it goes.

But the real problem is that they are criminals.

The main reason you can’t tell whether that masked goon ramming your car and shoving you into an unmarked van at gunpoint to be deposited some time later in the basement of an anonymous office block is an ICE agent or a criminal is that ramming cars and shoving citizens into unmarked vans and holding them in the basements of anonymous office blocks are things only criminals do.

Legitimate police don’t actually do any of that.

Legitimate police identify themselves, either state their immediate legal cause or present a real warrant (signed by a real judge), and then arrest you and put you in a marked police vehicle to take you to a signposted police station.

And they keep copious records of every part of that.

So of course we can’t distinguish them from criminals.