Immigration raids by masked federal agents have helped create a “reign of terror” in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass said in an interview aired Sunday on ABC.

Fear of arrest and deportation has prompted many of Southern California’s immigrants — no matter their legal status — to hunker down in their homes, missing work, forgoing church services and skipping milestones like children’s graduations. And Bass said the practice some Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have adopted of obscuring their faces with black masks makes a menacing encounter even more frightening.

“These masked men pull up in unmarked cars and jump out of the cars with rifles and detain people,” Bass said in a separate interview Sunday on CBS. “For the average citizen, it looks like it’s a violent kidnapping. You should never have that.”

I Don’t Encourage Agents to Mask Up: ICE Director

This month, 14 Democratic senators said in a letter to Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, that agents grabbing people off the street while masked and in plain clothes “represents a clear attempt to compound” the “fear and chaos” of immigration raids and “avoid accountability for agents’ actions.”

Lyons said in an interview Sunday on CBS that he did not encourage agents to use masks but would continue to let them wear them in the field “if that’s a tool they need to keep them and their families safe.”

Federal officials say the face coverings help protect ICE agents from being doxxed, or having personal details like a home address or contact information shared online.

Lyons also said that federal law enforcement agents can be identified by markings on their clothes.

The Department of Homeland Security, the parent federal agency of ICE, has said that its agents are facing a sharp uptick in attacks and threats, including an 830% increase in assaults compared with last year.

Related Story: DOJ Asks California Sheriffs for Names of Inmates Who Aren’t Citizens

Lyons Blames Elected Officials for Increase in Attacks on Agents

Lyons said that the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement has meant that ICE agents are more visible and more often in contact with members of the public. But he also blamed elected officials for the increase in attacks, saying they were “shaming, if you will, or speaking out against ICE.”

Bass expressed skepticism about the threat of violence ICE says its agents face.

“I don’t know, but I have a hard time believing that the woman selling pineapples on the corner will attack an ICE agent,” she said.

Related Story: Behind the Masks: Who Are the People Rounding Up Immigrants in California?

This month, Bass’ office said it had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records pertaining to how federal agents are supposed to identify themselves.

Debates over who is allowed to obscure their identity with a mask in public — be they law enforcement personnel or civilians — have become politically contentious across the country. In New York, Republican leaders in one Long Island county barred people from wearing face coverings in public to conceal their identities but recently announced that police officers working with ICE agents would be exempted from the rule.

Democratic lawmakers elsewhere in New York and in California have floated legislation that would do the opposite, barring law enforcement agents from covering their faces while on the job.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Alyce McFadden

c.2025 The New York Times Company