When ICE agents first began covering their faces to conceal their identities, someone asked me if this was lawful. I had no idea. The question had never come up before. Indeed, it was taken as a given that law enforcement should be easily identifiable. Think about people asking police officers for the name and badge number, a practice that became fairly common so that complaints could be lodged against them for improper actions and violations of constitutional rights.

As research quickly proved, there was no law requiring ICE agents to show their faces. Or have their names on their uniforms. Or wear visible shields with unique numbers. There was no way to know who engaged in impropriety or violated constitutional rights. It was just another guy in body armor, camo and a balaclava, undiscernible from any other guy similarly attired.

The Trump Department of Homeland Security rationalized the agents concealing their identities as necessary to protect ICE agents from being doxxed, attacked outside of work or having their families harassed or harmed. The legitimacy of this concern is dubious, both because there is scant evidence that any of this has or is happening and because these are government employees who, theoretically at least, work for the people and the people have every right to know who is acting under their name and hold them to account.

Is this right?

“ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” a federal judge, William Young, wrote in a blistering 161-page First Amendment ruling handed down last week. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” he continued. The judge, a Reagan appointee, compared immigration agents to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and declared that federal efforts to deport outspoken protesters amounted to a “full-throated assault” on freedom of speech. “Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”

Judge Young, not quite the “radical left lunatic” Trump calls judges who disagree with him, makes clear his conclusion that masked, armed men acting violently and with impunity, are engaged in acts designed to “terrorize Americans into quiescence.”

Is this a true secret police? The term is darkly tempting, though much of what we’ve observed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection this year has fallen distressingly within the bounds of our brutally capacious immigration law. The National Guard deployments, too, have unfolded in public view. The terroristic sweep of President Trump’s mass deportation program will be repeatedly litigated in the years to come, in courts of both law and public opinion — U.S. citizens arrested by agents apparently uninterested in their immigration status, agents drawing guns on civilian bystanders. And to the extent that many of those officers and their superiors have been not just enforcing laws and executive orders but also engaging in a kind of conspicuous and public cosplay, the costumes they have chosen are those of the enforcement arm of an authoritarian regime. When the masks came on, the mask came off.

There appears to be little concern on the part of the MAGA faithful that citizens are being swept up by ICE or that force that would be intolerable and unlawful by police officers is being routinely used by ICE and CBP (and the rest of the co-opted alphabet agencies that have forsaken their duties to stop drugs, child trafficking, foreign influence, spying and corporate crime) as long as the thrust is to deport, deport, deport anyone who isn’t 110% ‘Merican.

The cosplay is now bleeding into state violence, and even for those used to pointing fingers and calling out authoritarianism, the past week has been a precipitous escalation: Trump speaking of the “enemy from within” as a national defense strategy waiting for approval proposes focusing the military on domestic threats and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, compares political opposition to terrorism; a military-style raid on a Chicago apartment complex; local police officers hit with tear gas from ICE agents.

This view might change if it turns out that ICE broadens its sweep to include them or their loved ones, but right now their hatred of aliens is so well established that they are not only able to shrug off any excessive and unconstitutional uses of force and violence, but are really kind of thrilled to see it happening. As many of the MAGA reply guys on twitter informed me when I questioned whether shooting live rounds at American protesters was in our future, “FAFO,” occasionally including a “LMFAO” for good measure.

This coming weekend is the Chicago Marathon, where there will be about 20,000 foreign participants, including 3,000 runners from Mexico. Must the runners carry their visas and passports? Will ICE shoot them for “fleeing” as they run the marathon? Will ICE be there? What about the Super Bowl with Bad Bunny performing at half time, or the Olympics in Los Angeles? What about the daily lives of American citizens who live in a Chicago apartment building whose doors were kicked in, homes ransacked and children cuffed and made to sit in vans naked for hours?