The Trump Justice Department filed a lawsuit Monday to stop California’s new law that seeks to ban federal immigration officers from wearing masks to conceal their identities, saying the government “does not intend to comply.”
Trump officials cast the state law as an illegal attempt to undermine federal immigration enforcement powers, and said it puts agents and their families at risk by exposing their identities to dangerous people.
The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and cheered by anti-ICE activists nationwide, is slated to take effect in January.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, signed another law requiring officers who aren’t in uniform to wear some sort of identification, showing them as federal agents.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi called the laws “anti-enforcement policies.”
“Law enforcement officers risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe, and they do not deserve to be doxed or harassed simply for carrying out their duties,” she said.
The department, in the lawsuit, said both laws violate the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution by trying to exert control over how federal law enforcement is carried out.
Federal lawyers also said the law is discriminatory since it only applies to federal officers and not to state officers.
The department said it is announcing federal agents’ intention not to comply now, so that it can get a court ruling before the laws take effect on Jan. 1.
Anti-ICE activists have complained that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is leading much of President Trump’s mass deportation effort, has turned into a secret police with its effort to hide agents’ identities while scouring communities for illegal immigrant targets to arrest.
Activists have tried to catalog the identities of officers they have been able to identify, leading to some reports of harassment.
Homeland Security says ICE officers have seen a surge in both assaults and death threats aimed at them.
California’s anti-masking law is known as the No Secret Police Act. The law requiring federal officers out of uniform to wear visible identification that denotes their agency or a badge number is called the No Vigilantes Act.
That’s in response to what law enforcement acknowledges has been a notable increase in publicly reported cases of people pretending to be immigration officers.
In a bulletin last month, the FBI said criminals had been found posing as immigration officers to carry out robberies, kidnappings and sexual assaults.
The bulletin, reported by Wired, cited five incidents in 2025 and attributed the increase to ICE’s higher profile amid Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement push.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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