Masked federal agents aren’t exactly Trump’s secret police. But they are hiding from accountability.

The arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk in March is close to the worst-case scenario of how the Trump administration could deploy federal power against perceived political opponents. Ozturk, a Tufts University student in the United States on a student visa, was detained and slated for deportation for no other demonstrable reason than that she’d co-written an essay critical of the school’s response to the war in Gaza. It took a month and a half for her legal team to successfully argue for her release from detention.

If her legal case might be a warning of what’s to come, the arrest itself has already proved to be. Ozturk was arrested in Somerville, Massachusetts, after walking down a public street into a web of waiting plainclothes federal agents. At least one agent produced a badge only once she was detained; several were shown on video wearing or pulling up face coverings with the effect of concealing their identities.

In the weeks since her arrest, similar scenes have become commonplace. Reports and social media posts from across the country document federal agents seizing targeted individuals (and likely some number of non-targeted ones) while wearing plainclothes and face coverings. The mass deportation effort Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail has unfolded less like a careful, accountable police operation than the emergence of a secret police force acting on behalf of the chief executive.

This is almost certainly not an accident.

One was made obvious in 2020, when the first Trump administration deployed unidentified law enforcement officers on the streets of D.C. as a response to protests over the murder of George Floyd. Former FBI special agent Clint Watts explained why federal officers deploying anonymity was so fraught.

“If I go out and I pull out a gun and I say, ‘Freeze,’ and they say why, I would have to say, ‘I’m an FBI agent’ or law enforcement officer or whatever,” Watts told me then, “because, otherwise, they would be totally in the right to defend themselves potentially.”

He noted that counterprotests at the time were already populated by civilians in paramilitary gear, sometimes civilians who had tasked themselves with providing security and backstopping law enforcement, but with neither the legal power to do so nor the accountability mechanisms that accompany that power. Two months later, Kyle Rittenhouse killed several protesters after assuming precisely such a role.

We’ve already seen numerous examples this year of civilians pretending to be immigration agents in order to coerce or intimidate other people. In an environment where any guy on the street could turn out to be part of an ICE or Homeland Security sting operation, such impersonations become trivially easy.

But even if this weren’t a country flooded with guns and a long history of vigilantism, unidentified federal agents would be a problem precisely because they are less likely to face accountability for their actions.

Radley Balko, a former Post colleague and author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” explained in an email to me that this desire for anonymity is likely a function of numerous overlapping impulses.

“The masking thing isn’t exactly new,” he said. “I think it grew more common with the general trend toward militarization, as balaclavas became a standard part of the SWAT uniform. There was really no safety reason for it. It was mostly about intimidation.” This pattern is more common now, he said, probably in part because officers are worried about being targeted.

But that doesn’t simply mean being targeted for violence from hostile actors (which obviously can happen). It also means being targeted by efforts to hold officers accountable for their actions, something that has become more common in the post-cellphone, post-Black Lives Matter environment. Balko pointed to an occurrence in 2007 when masked Drug Enforcement Administration officers swarmed into the home of two innocent women.

“For nine years, the federal courts refused to compel the agencies to reveal the identities of the officers,” he wrote. “And without their names, the women couldn’t sue. Their case was eventually dismissed.”

This overlaps with another motivation: impunity.

“Just based on my own research and reporting, I think there’s a strong correlation between cops who think they’re above the law,” Balko said, “and cops who shield their faces and refuse to give names and badge numbers.”

Trump has made very clear that he has little interest in confronting police corruption or abuse. On the campaign trail last year, he explicitly framed his candidacy as allied with law enforcement, building on his pro-police first term in office. He’s already signed an executive order in which he pledges to use the federal government to “protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials.”

“Trump’s [Justice Department] is never going to hold them criminally liable for any abuses,” Balko said of the unidentifiable officers. “They essentially have carte blanche to do whatever they want.”

Those who would enforce accountability themselves face that impunity. When a man allegedly put up flyers identifying ICE agents in Southern California, officers from the Department of Homeland Security raided his parents’ house, deploying a SWAT-level force to the home — and provided aerial footage of the convoy to Fox News.

“These are public employees that are accountable to the public and accountable to Congress,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said in a social media post on Saturday. “And this idea that we are going to allow some kind of paramilitary force to bloom that is not in any way … accountable to the Constitution of the United States? We’ve got another thing coming.”

This lack of accountability, she said, was what was “actually anti-American” — given that it served “to attack free speech, to attack the powers of Congress, to erode our ability to investigate and conduct oversight.”

Molly Pucci, assistant professor of 20th-century European history at Trinity College, wrote a 2020 book on the use of secret police in Cold War Eastern Europe. She noted in an email to me that the anonymity of the immigration officers isn’t directly comparable to the sort of security forces deployed in East Germany or Czechoslovakia that came to be known as “secret police” by the public. Where parallels could be drawn, she said, was in ICE being deployed to serve as an intimidating force for other elements of the government (such as by lingering near courtrooms or, interjecting my own example, eagerly confronting elected officials including members of Congress).

In 2020, I spoke with former New York City police commissioner William Bratton about the unidentified officers in D.C.

“What is the need for anonymity in controlling crowd demonstrations?” he asked rhetorically — and justifiably. It’s a question that’s extensible to the current moment: Why would federal law enforcement need to take steps to muddy accountability or mask their identities?

As in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, the answer is obvious: if there is reason their actions would need to be held to account.