Masks

[kmaherali]

The Changing Politics of Masks

Accountability and privacy are on a collision course that raises the stakes for the role of face-covering in modern life.


Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Lately it seems almost impossible to look at a news feed or catch up on current events and not be greeted by the picture of a man in a mask.

Or rather a neck gaiter, buff or scarf made to cover the mouth and nose, along with a baseball cap or helmet to hide the crown of the head, and shades to obscure the eyes.

Such are the images of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — on the streets, in courts, at factories — rounding up individuals the agency claims are undocumented immigrants (as well as, sometimes, those they say are helping them).

Such are the images of ICE agents illustrating stories about new legislation introduced in Congress and in states across the country, including New York, California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, to prohibit the agents from hiding their faces while doing their jobs. And such are the images of protesters speaking out against ICE actions — or for Palestine — and obscuring their identities while doing so.

Sometimes the coverings are black, sometimes they are star-spangled and sometimes they are hunter’s camo, but at all times it’s the mask that stands out. The mask that is at the center of the story. The mask that has become the catalyst for a debate about whether such face coverings are a tool of intimidation or protection, of good or evil.

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A young man and woman, both masked, stand at a food truck on an otherwise deserted street.

Times Square during the first week of lockdown in New York, March 2020. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Masks have not played this big a role in the public discourse since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic made them a part of everyone’s life and they became a flashpoint for the debate over public safety and private agency, community and individuality.

Then, as now, they were a symbol of the times; a bit of material that somehow embodied all the complicated, contradictory emotions associated with that period. In part, that’s because they were not associated solely with that period. Just as they are not today.

“There is so much that gets loaded onto a mask,” said Darren Fisher, a senior lecturer in comic and concept art at the University for the Creative Arts in Britain.

The rare accessory that is both functional and fantastical, a mask is not just a thing that covers the face. It is a multilayered repository of meaning that stretches across centuries and cultures high and low. It is a trigger for a host of associations that are much greater than the specific case at hand.

Masks turn people into “archetypes,” Dr. Fisher said. And those archetypes are rooted in history, religion, art, politics and Hollywood.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the resurgence of the mask has coincided with a period of peak superhero,” said Angela Ndalianis, a professor of media and entertainment at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. When we see a mask, what we see depends on the stories we tell ourselves.





Clockwise from top left: Tyrone Power in “The Mark of Zorro,” 1940; Adam West in “Batman,” 1966; Dave Prowse as Darth Vader in “Star Wars,” 1980; and Tobey Maguire in “Spider Man 2,” 2004. Credit...Everett Collection; Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Power of the Mask

People have been donning masks since the theaters of ancient Greece and Rome. There are masks in the Japanese Noh tradition. Masks play a part in a variety of shamanistic rituals. Masks are part of the legacy of Guy Fawkes and the foiling of the gunpowder plot to blow up King James I. They are also part of the romance of Zorro, the sword-wielding defender of the poor, and the mythology of the Lone Ranger.

Masks are tools of bank robbers and outlaws, and they’re a regular presence in horror films and a defining trope of superhero culture. They are at the heart of Halloween. Orville Peck, the country and western singer, is known for his masks. So are the rappers Ayleo and Mateo Bowles. Recently Glenn Martens put every model in his couture show for Maison Margiela in a mask.

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A male model, his head concealed with a silver covering, is seen on a runway, bare-chested in a dark green jacket and long skirt covered in sparkly bits.

The models in Glenn Martens’s couture collection for Maison Margiela wore masks, embracing one of Martin Margiela’s most enduring motifs.Credit...Maison Margiela

In almost every case, the masks serve a dual purpose: They protect or disguise a “real” identity and transform the person wearing the mask into something other. Masks are the means by which a character moves beyond the bounds of the physical world and the world of man. Whether that is good or bad is the essence of the debate that surrounds the mask, but either way, Dr. Ndalianis said, it represents “power.”

“Masks are part of the anthropological idea of liminality,” said Graham M. Jones, a professor of anthropology at M.I.T. “They symbolize the threshold beyond the known or everyday. Once you pass beyond that threshold, you exist in some other state, which is associated with unknowable power.” The mask takes an individual beyond the law — of the physical world and of man.

It is what creates Batman and Bane, Spiderman and Darth Vader. By donning a mask, the heroes (or villains) free themselves from having to pretend to be something they are not. Like human. Or moral.

In this way, though a mask is nominally a disguise, it is also a means to reveal the “true self” as opposed to the self you may have constructed for the world, said Nicola Formichetti, a stylist who has often explored the use of masks in his work with Lady Gaga. It can allow a repudiation of an identity that conforms to expectations and society.

That’s liberating and terrifying in equal measure because it takes away not just identity, but also accountability. In becoming something else, you suddenly have license to act in a different way. This was the function of the mask during Venetian masked balls where debauchery replaced proper behavior for a night. It was also the basis of “The Mask,” the 1994 film starring Jim Carrey as a nerdy guy whose id essentially takes over when he discovers an ancient mask.

The Protection of the Mask

This narrative stew is partly why, for some people, ICE agents in masks are so frightening. It is not just because the masks tap into age-old horror movie motifs, but also because they seem to convey permission to act in ways that would otherwise be constrained. They represent a place beyond the norms, which feeds into the idea that the Trump administration and its representatives are going beyond the norms of democratic government.

It is also why others may see the masked men as saviors, lawmen willing to do what their predecessors would not, or could not, to right what they believe is wrong. Either way, Dr. Ndalianis said, “You can draw a line directly from Marvel to ICE.”

That is the same subconscious connection that led to a thread on social media framing Luigi Mangione, the so-called “masked gunman” who has been accused of murdering Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, as a social bandit, a Robin Hood figure of sorts, fighting for the victims of the insurance industry.

Unmasked, his name was revealed — which underscores the idea that “faces are a source of vulnerability,” said Elizabeth Joh, a law professor who specializes in privacy and technology at the University of California, Davis.

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Students wore masks in protest in Hong Kong in November 2019. A month earlier, the government had made it illegal to wear masks at public gatherings.Credit...Jerome Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock

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Demonstrators rally outside Columbia University in March 2025 to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia student.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Faces are how we recognize one another, as well as how we read the meaning and emotions behind words. By your face, others do know you. Thus to cover the face is to protect yourself — not just from germs, as during the pandemic or environmental disasters like wildfires and smog, but from other people’s prejudices and government overreach.

This theory of masks posits them as a beneficial shield from the ills of the world, its judgment and retribution. See, for example, the Phantom of “The Phantom of the Opera,” who wears a mask to hide his disfigurement, and the superheroes who hide their faces to safeguard their private identities.

It also dramatizes the fact that ideas about accountability and privacy are on a collision course that has raised the stakes about the role of the mask in modern life even more.

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Men and women on a crowded street, some with face masks, some not.

In May 2022, as the United States neared a million Covid deaths, masked and unmasked pedestrians walked on 42nd Street in Manhattan. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The result is a tension that has been growing since the student protests over Gaza and the Hong Kong democracy protests before them. The difference when it comes to ICE is that, in those instances, the opposition was between the rights of individuals to state their beliefs without fear of reprisal versus the right of the state to maintain order. With ICE, the individuals arguing that they need cover are doing so because of actions taken under orders from the state.

All of this is only going to become more confusing with the widespread use of plastic surgery, artificial intelligence, filters and other digital tools that have popularized the ability to transform the theoretically unmasked face into — yes — its own kind of mask.

Later this month, a new production of “The Phantom of the Opera” will open in New York. Entitled “Masquerade,” it is conceived as a piece of immersive theater in which all attendees will be asked to don a mask, many of them created by Mr. Formichetti, who has been named to the peculiarly contemporary role of the production’s “director of masks.”

You can bring your own or use one of the masks provided for you, but either way, everyone will have the experience of trying one on.

The Great Mask Debate

Who Gets to Wear a Mask? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/nyre ... ounty.html
July 18, 2025

Should ICE Agents Be Allowed to Wear Masks? It Depends Whom You Ask. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/p ... masks.html
July 20, 2025

The Mask https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/styl ... virus.html
March 17, 2020
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/styl ... e9677ea768

[kmaherali]

ICE Agents Are Wearing Masks. Is That Un-American?

The long, strange story of masking and law enforcement.



By Sabrina Tavernise
Sept. 5, 2025
One of the defining images of President Trump’s second term so far has been security officers in masks. Whether detaining a Turkish student on the street in Boston, raiding Home Depot parking lots in Los Angeles or, now, arresting immigrants on the streets of the capital, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in tactical gear and with their faces obscured have become a strange new national pageant.

The Homeland Security Department says that in an era of extreme polarization and rising political violence, masks are necessary. “ICE officers wear a mask because they’ve been doxxed by the thousands,” Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, told my colleagues at “The Daily.” “Their families have been doxxed. ICE officers’ pictures show up on trees and telephone poles. Death threats are sky-high.” Masking, the argument goes, is simply the practical response.

Lawmakers in liberal states say the practice should be banned, and this summer, Democratic elected officials in California, New York and Pennsylvania proposed laws to do just that. At the end of July, Virginia’s Democratic senators introduced a bill to ban the use of masks nationally. The issue also got the attention of a federal judge, who, in a ruling on Tuesday against Mr. Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles, noted disapprovingly that the armed forces’ identity “was often obscured by protective armor.”

As I watched all of this, I found myself wondering about masking by law enforcement and whether it has a history in the United States. Something about it seemed at once familiar and foreign. That’s because I associate the practice with Russia.

In the summer of 2000, when President Vladimir Putin had just taken office, I was living in Moscow and working as a reporter. At the time, the first battle lines were being drawn between the new president and the powerful oligarchs he hoped to tame. Russians began to see raids by government forces on oligarchs and their properties. Men in masks conducted them. They became so ubiquitous that people began referring to them sardonically as Maski Show, or mask shows, after a popular television show involving mask-wearing clowns.

The United States is not Russia. But as I search for ways to understand what is happening in my country today, I am looking to the places I’ve been before. In Russia in the 2000s, I thought of masking as a peculiar feature of a wobbly post-Soviet state. Over time it became clear that it was a harbinger of a new era.

The Power and the Danger

Masks became a feature of America’s fiercely polarized political life during the Covid pandemic. Mask requirements enraged conservatives, who saw them as an effort by the government to boss them around on flimsy science. Concerns about the virus’s spread subsided, but the debate seemed to have unlocked something in the American psyche about the power — and danger — of masks.

Over the past several years, states and counties began passing laws against masking that applied to protesters in demonstrations, reasoning that they would be more likely to do something illegal if law enforcement couldn’t see their faces.

Some of those laws echoed statutes passed in the 1940s and 1950s by states and cities that were trying to control the Ku Klux Klan, said Robert Mickey, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Even though Klan chapters were often “shot through with members of the police,” Mr. Mickey said, those officers, who showed their faces during the day, wore masks when doing the work of the Klan at night.

There are good reasons vigilantes wear masks and police officers don’t. Policing experts argue that masking by law enforcement is wrong because officers are public servants and are supposed to be accountable to the public. Hiding behind a mask makes that harder. Yes, officers’ jobs can be dangerous, but being publicly identifiable goes along with having the right to wield a deadly weapon on behalf of the state.

In recent years in the United States, trends in law enforcement were moving in the opposite direction. Many police departments now use body cameras and require that the officer’s badge, with name and number, be visible.

Michael German, a retired F.B.I. agent who is now a fellow in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said that even when he worked undercover, “the period of secrecy ended when charges were brought and I had to defend what I had done in that undercover capacity.”

Masking provides leeway for abuse, he said. People tend to be more scrupulous and vigilant when they can be personally held accountable for their actions. A mask allows more latitude for sloppiness or shortcuts — a punch or a kick, for example.

No one I interviewed could think of an example of American law enforcement masking. Jules Epstein, a law professor at Temple University who worked for decades as a criminal defense lawyer and death penalty litigator, said that in his more than 45 years of practice, he had never seen the police wear masks, including in high-profile gang cases.

‘Without Question a Bad Sign’

Outside the United States, masking by law enforcement has a long history. When it happens, it tends to be in countries with weak central governments, sometimes ones that are fighting insurgencies or drug cartels or, for that matter, political opponents.

In Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, the government worked with paramilitary groups — forces on the side of the government but not directly employed by it — that often wore masks. They operated at the margins of the law, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, and over time, courts and special tribunals have documented abuses they perpetrated. In Colombia, the state was up against a well-equipped and deadly foe: drug cartels. Anyone obstructing them had reason to fear for their lives. Judges wore masks to avoid reprisal killings, a practice that became known as “judges without faces.”

Law enforcement officers in Mexico sometimes mask, too, Mr. Isacson said, in areas where drug cartels have a strong presence.

In Peru, government forces often wore masks in their war against Shining Path guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist who has studied Latin America and written about democratic decline. In areas where Shining Path was strongest, police officers were afraid of reprisals by the guerrillas but also of becoming pariahs in their own communities for abuses they themselves committed, he said.

More recently, Human Rights Watch has documented cases of government forces using masks in Venezuela during the repression that followed the country’s tainted presidential election last year. And in the Philippines, victims of Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign report that the people doing the killing were sometimes masked.

“The use of masks,” Mr. Levitsky said, “is without question a bad sign.”

And it is extremely rare in functional democracies. “I cannot think of a democratic country with a reliable rule of law where security forces mask themselves,” Mr. Levitsky said. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Stronger, more confident regimes rarely mask. Totalitarian states that have established control over their populations tend to avoid moves that would stir dissent. Masking can draw attention to the fact that the government is up to something it wants to hide, or that it is not powerful enough to protect its own forces. In short, it’s a bad look.

In China, the security forces do not wear masks, said Lynette Ong, a China scholar and professor at the University of Toronto. But something else happens. In her book, “Outsourcing Repression,” Ms. Ong explains that China’s everyday security policing force draws from ordinary people mobilized from the street and paid a daily rate or hired on a contract. The state does not formally employ them, and when they are caught harming someone, the government can plausibly say it was not responsible. China may be authoritarian, she said, but public officials can be held accountable for abuse. They can be fired, for example, if their forces are caught on camera beating people up.

Masks are rare in Iran, too, though they are occasionally used in drug and organized crime operations, said Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who is now an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based organization focused on U.S. policy in the Middle East. He said that when he was arrested in 2005, no one, not even his interrogators, wore masks.

“The people who interrogated me, they wanted me to see their faces,” Mr. Memarian said.

The reason was that the government wanted to show that what it was doing was legitimate. They also arrested him discreetly, “without a splash,” Mr. Memarian said. A number of armed men came to his building, but his neighbors had no idea it was happening. They kept it low-key so as not to draw the attention of regime critics.

“Once a mask is involved,” he said, “people understand it as a sign of weakness, that the government has something to hide.”

The Show

In Russia in the early 2000s, Mr. Putin wasn’t trying to hide anything. On the contrary: He was putting on a show that he wanted everyone to see. Russia’s central government had been plagued by weakness throughout the 1990s, with the oligarchs running official agencies and having their way with the state. The Maski Shows were efforts by this new leader to turn the tables.

One of the most famous episodes took place a few days after Mr. Putin was inaugurated in May 2000. Armed men in military fatigues and masks showed up at one of the offices that belonged to the oligarch who had founded the first independent television network, NTV.

Yevgeny Kiselyov, then the director of the channel and its main anchor, remembers being struck by the over-the-top nature of the force. “They were carrying out their operation as if this building was full of heavily armed terrorists,” he said in an interview. In reality, it was middle-aged women working in accounting.

The television station was eventually taken over by the state, and Mr. Kiselyov now lives outside Russia. He said the meaning of the raid was clear even then. It was a public message, not just to that station and its owner, but to anyone who opposed Mr. Putin. “It was an act of intimidation,” he said. “It was saying, ‘We are now in power, and we are going after you.’”

The Trump administration seems to be sending the same message with ICE, except in this case, the targets are not oligarchs, but immigrants and the businesses who employ them.

But there are other audiences. Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, who helped oversee border security in the George W. Bush administration, said he believes the performance is aimed at would-be migrants around the world. Former President Joe Biden, “no matter what he did, could not change the view of the world that the border was open,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “I knew it was going to take someone who was going to create some heartache, and that they’d have to be very tough and create some fear to change the circumstances.”

And then there’s the domestic audience. Polling suggests that many Americans don’t like Mr. Trump’s tactics around deportations, at least when it comes to immigrants who have not committed violent crimes. But some Americans do approve of it, perhaps drawn to its dark spectacle. The immigrant detention center in Florida known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is now tied up in court battles, has its own merch. Americans pose for selfies by the center’s new highway sign and post them on social media. In early August, Indiana announced a partnership with the Homeland Security Department to build the “Speedway Slammer,” its answer to Alligator Alcatraz. A few weeks later, Nebraska announced plans for the “Cornhusker Clink.”

Mr. Levitsky called the highly visible, almost ostentatious use of masks “a performance but with real-world consequences.” “MAGA seems to get something out of playing authoritarian,” he said. “There’s an element of cosplay to it.”

Perhaps the most important audience of all is the agency itself — and its potential recruits. ICE says it wants to hire 10,000 new agents at a time when hiring law enforcement officers has been hard. It got a multibillion-dollar cash infusion from Congress in July. Masking could serve to reassure reluctant applicants, who are worried for their safety or about being judged by people they know, but also to attract more exuberant ones, who see masking as subversive and fun.

In August, the Homeland Security Department posted on social media an image in the style of the TV show “South Park” that showed a caravan of cartoon figures riding in ICE cars. Their faces were all covered from the nose down. At the top of the post was a link: JOIN.ICE.GOV.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/i ... e9677ea768