In
the still-dark hours one recent morning, federal agents descended on a
South Shore apartment building in Chicago. Armed, masked ICE officers
rappelled from helicopters, burst through doors, and swept through every
floor—detaining adults and children alike, some in pajamas, zip-tied,
and held in the parking lot for hours. Debris, toys, and broken
furniture littered the halls. Most of those swept up—including U.S.
citizens and legal residents—were released without charge, and
Illinois’s governor himself said he could not learn where many had been
taken. No search warrant for the building was ever produced; no clear,
timely explanation was offered. Days later, federal officials released a
glossy, edited highlight reel of the action on social media, justifying
the operation with boilerplate language about “reliable intelligence”
and “criminal activity”—but without specific details or transparency.
Just days earlier, federal agents shot Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, five times during an enforcement action. Agency spokespeople initially claimed she was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and attacking officers. Court filings, bodycam footage, and shifting official statements soon told a different story: Martinez was unarmed (the official government filing does not mention a gun) and shot, according to Martinez' lawyers, after being rammed by a law enforcement vehicle—yet these contradictions were buried in reporting, and the government never appeared publicly to account for the action.
Once upon a time—in real life and in Hollywood’s imagination—a crisis
like this would have produced another kind of public spectacle: the
American press conference. Police chiefs, agency heads, mayors, even
presidents would line up, awaiting unscripted and persistent
questioning. Reporters would demand not just numbers but clear explanations—why
these tactics, who authorized them, what went wrong, what safeguards
existed. It was sometimes flawed, sometimes messy, but it was a ritual
of transparency, the people’s demand for answers. It was the face of
democracy, unmasked.
Today,
that ritual of public explanation is vanishing. The sharp decline in
presidential and agency press conferences—already pronounced in Trump’s
first term—deepened under President Biden, whose administration held
fewer formal pressers and revoked hundreds of journalists’ credentials,
setting a modern low for media access. What began as neglect or caution
became, under Trump’s new tenure, not accident but deliberate
camouflage: a standardized, institutionalized form of political
inaccessibility, now deployed as cover during domestic deployments of
extraordinary force.
The
“faces” of power—like those of masked ICE agents—are now concealed
behind layers of PR statements, staged media events, and rare,
tightly-controlled briefings. When violence erupts, when citizens go
missing, when entire families are rendered temporarily homeless by a
federal sweep, both government and media largely move on. No
high-profile pressers for the nation to watch. No opportunity for a
governor, police chief, or agency head to be grilled in real time. The
press, itself increasingly cowed by the threat of lost access or
outright retribution, seldom notes this radical transformation of public
life.
This
is not an accident. Trump’s regime has standardized
inaccessibility—making secrecy and evasion fundamental tools of power.
The “mask” becomes both symbol and method, hiding not just the faces of
agencies on the ground, but the responsibility and reasoning of those at
the top. In this new landscape, democracy’s rituals—press conferences,
Q&As, unscripted follow-ups—have been quietly replaced by spectacle,
a highlight reel in place of an honest reckoning.
The
mask is not just on the agents. It is worn now by the state itself. And
every time the news fails to pull it back, we drift further into a
republic where anything can be done in the night, unknown and
unexplained, fitting the shape and story of unchecked power.
