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New York’s Nassau County and its Trump-backed executive are giving the nation a grim view into the future of MAGA policing.
Amid rising backlash to viral videos of masked immigration agents carrying out Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Trump ally, last week signed an executive order that exempts some law enforcement officials from a ban on wearing masks in public, which was passed in response to protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
As the New York Post reported:
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has carved out a key exemption to the county’s controversial mask ban — allowing local cops involved in ICE raids and working undercover to still wear face coverings. The existing law only exempts public mask-wearing for religious or health reasons, but Blakeman’s new executive order now gives federal, state and local law-enforcement officers the option to wear masks during operations such as drug and gang raids and soon, immigration enforcement alongside ICE.
ICE’s enforcement actions (some of which have ensnared U.S. citizens) have been decried for alleged reliance on racial profiling — a point Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., raised on Monday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show” and was reinforced recently by a federal judge’s order that ICE stop racially profiling Los Angeles residents. Such allegations provide context for critics’ comparisons of masked immigration enforcement agents to the Ku Klux Klan, whose members notoriously wore masks to conceal their identities as they wrought havoc on, and occasionally rounded up, nonwhite people.
Nassau County and Blakeman are moving forward with the plan to empower masked law enforcement agents — a move that follows Blakeman’s creation last year of a civilian militia he wants to endow with law enforcement powers during “emergencies.” That proposal is currently being challenged in court and is separate from a partnership that Blakeman has worked out to allocate 10 detectives to assist with ICE’s deportation efforts.
The potential for a masked hodgepodge of law enforcement agents working alongside untrained, anonymous civilians rounding up suspected immigrants (and those who assist them) does little to soften comparisons to the KKK in Nassau County. But it does provide a disturbing look at what could be the future of policing under the Trump administration.