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In this country, federal immigration agents are using masks to cover their faces when arresting people. Agents are also masking their vehicles by operating cars without license plates or by switching plates. The evidence for this includes videos reviewed by NPR. NPR's Ximena Bustillo and Chiara Eisner investigated. And here's Chiara.
CHIARA EISNER, BYLINE: The founder of the Eyes Up application, an app to share videos of federal agents arresting migrants, has reviewed hundreds of videos over the past few months. He said he's noticed some patterns in the cars federal agents are driving when they detain people across the country.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: So we're not only seeing a wide range of vehicles, but we're seeing older vehicles and we're seeing disguised vehicles.
EISNER: During arrests, cars that the agents are using don't typically have the agency name on the side of the car. And they sometimes have no license plates on the back either.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I would say roughly 5%. Five to 10% of these videos have vehicles with no plates.
EISNER: The founder of the application asked NPR not to use his name. He fears retribution for making a platform that tracks activity of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. But he's not the only one who has noticed this kind of disguise. In a video that appears to be in Chicago, a car that appears to be used by a Border Patrol agent had a Mexican flag painted on the hood. That video was uploaded to social media. Activists in Los Angeles have also photographed federal agents leaving a staging area with different license plates on the cars than those cars had on previous days.
A man who appeared to be a federal agent said something similar is happening in Illinois, too. In a video posted to social media in October, he told a bystander filming his car's plate that he needn't bother because they, quote, "change the plates out every day." ICE declined to confirm that the men who appeared in those photographs and videos were federal agents, and NPR didn't independently verify the video's authenticity. But the Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said swapping plates is not allowed.
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ALEXI GIANNOULIAS: Flipping license plates or altering them in any way to avoid detection is strictly prohibited in Illinois.
EISNER: An ICE spokesperson, Mike Alvarez, said federal law enforcement agency cars are exempt from displaying plates when that interferes with their duties. ICE's own guidelines indicate agents are required to submit paperwork when they want to drive vehicles without plates. But NPR asked for that paperwork to see if employees have been filing those waivers, and ICE hasn't provided reporters with the records yet. Catherine Crump is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, who focuses on cases at the intersection of technology and civil liberties. She said concealing the identity of vehicles is risky for the public.
CATHERINE CRUMP: You have to be able to identify officers so you can vindicate your constitutional rights when they're violated. And to the extent, this is yet another step ICE agents are taking to conceal their identities and avoid accountability.
EISNER: Police officers do go undercover sometimes.
DANIEL HODGES: Unmarked cars are good for some things.
EISNER: That was Daniel Hodges, an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., who was attacked on January 6 at the riot on the U.S. Capitol. Since August, ICE has increased activity in D.C. and has arrested more than 900 migrants in the city. But Hodges says it's unclear what benefit unmarked cars have for immigration arrests. And masking vehicles could make it harder for police to do their jobs.
HODGES: I think that's causing a great deal of erosion of trust that we've worked to build up over the last few years. We've got to live with that destruction of trust after the feds go away.
EISNER: But the federal agents and their cars might not be going away anytime soon. ICE received $70 billion from Congress over the summer to expand its operations, including adding vehicles to its fleet and hiring thousands of new deportation officers.
Chiara Eisner, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID HOLMES' "THE TRUNK SCENE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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