This is an adapted excerpt from the June 5 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
The term “secret police” invokes a kind of haunting specter. When we see representations of it in movies or history, we immediately identify it with a certain kind of regime: One that tramples people’s liberty with no accountability. We associate it with authoritarian governments and dictatorships like the former Soviet Union, where people, usually armed, could wield the authority of the state but were, themselves, totally unaccountable in the same way.
Watching it feels wrong, weird, alien and menacing.
Whatever issues there are with American policing — and there are many — at least our police officers have names on their uniforms and badge numbers. But now, in the era of immigration under Donald Trump, one cannot help but notice that in clip after clip, interaction after interaction, the people enforcing the president’s policies have all the qualities that one would associate with the concept of “secret police.”
In videos, these individuals are usually masked and either wearing plain clothes or irregular uniforms. They won’t give their names or say what agency they’re with.
Watching it feels wrong, weird, alien and menacing. It does not feel like these law enforcement officials are subject to the authority of a democratic government. It’s so striking, in scene after scene, to see regular people asking masked agents, “Who are you?” and “What are you doing?” and not receiving an answer.
That’s what we saw play out in one of the first videos of this kind to be made public: The arrest of Columbia student and lawful resident Mahmoud Khalil. In that video, you can see plainclothes officers apprehending Khalil in the lobby of his building. The officers pointedly refused to identify themselves or what agency they were with. “We don’t give our name,” one man said, after handcuffing and detaining a legal resident of the United States.
Not long after that, we got video of the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was snatched off the street by masked agents and led away in handcuffs.
In New Bedford, Massachusetts, there was the chilling scene from last month in which masked agents broke a car window and forcibly removed a man they say was in the country illegally.
Just last weekend, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, masked agents detained an apparently undocumented gardener at his place of work.
In San Diego that same weekend, residents tried to hold back what appeared to be militarized agents who were reportedly executing an immigration raid on local businesses.
We’ve also got allegations of all kinds of lies, manipulation and subterfuge. Eyewitnesses in Tucson, Arizona, allege agents posed as city utility workers as part of an arrest attempt. There have been reports of agents performing wellness checks on children, which critics say is a trap for immigration enforcement. All this feels like something distinct from the normal forms of policing and law enforcement that we’re used to.
As the writer M. Gessen, who was born in the then-Soviet Union, put it in a column for The New York Times: “The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.”
“The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger,” Gessen wrote. “Anyone — a passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer.”
This administration is treating people as if they have no rights, as if they can be rounded up at whim without any due process. That is the legal theory of the Trump administration. It believes that immigrants in this country don’t have rights, even though that’s very clearly not true.
The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.
The Constitution is clear on this, and precedent is clear on this: Immigrants have due process rights. But the Trump administration seems to believe the state can do whatever it wants to people.
According to Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, the agents in these videos are wearing masks for their own safety. “They wear a mask because they’re trying to protect themselves and their families,” Homan said on Fox News. “Agents are getting doxed every day, their pictures and phone numbers being put on telephone poles. These leftists are following and filming when they go home from work at night.”
In a statement to NBC News about these recent immigration crackdowns, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.”