Immigration raids are being carried out by law enforcement, not civilians. Don't fall for conspiracy theories.

Over the last couple of months, a conspiracy theory has been brewing in the primordial slop that is social media comment sections. BlueAnon, a group of terminally online centrists, have been saying the countless videos of masked immigration enforcement officers are secretly right-wing paramilitary groups that have either been deputized by DHS or are masquerading as them.

To be clear upfront — while they may not always be ICE specifically — these disappearances are being perpetrated by law enforcement officers, not by anybody else. There is ample evidence to back this up, primarily in the form of agency heads screaming at the top of their lungs they're going after migrants full bore. Yet, regardless of the countless videos and articles disproving this very fake and not real conspiracy theory, these people continue to spread baseless rumours because it fits into their worldview about what law enforcement and their government actually is.

While they have accurately assessed that these immigration raids are evil, their failure to believe the things unfolding before their eyes betrays the necessity of the moment. Instead, it gives even more power to the law enforcement agencies kidnapping people because it spreads unnecessary panic and disinformation that can impede people from acting to defend their communities. If you are going up against an enemy you believe to be something it's not, you will be less effective – which is why it’s important to have accurate information about who you're up against.

If the mass of officers carrying out an immigration raid look like a mishmash of people who shouldn’t be there, it’s because that's what they are. The shift towards immigration enforcement across the United States has been staggering. Agencies like the FBI, that have nothing to do with immigration, have been ordered to shift their focus towards detaining migrants. About 45% of all agents in the 25 largest FBI field offices are now working on immigration full time. The amount of 287(g) agreements, which delegates immigration enforcement to state and local law enforcement, has spiked from 135 in December of 2024 to nearly 600 in mid-May. The person arresting a migrant could be any old desk agent who hasn't seen the field in ages because they're trying to turn every single law enforcement agent into ICE. They shouldn't be there because they do not belong in your communities. The people who belong in your communities are the ones they're taking away.

Historically, there has been some overlap between these agencies and the far-right groups these BlueAnon posters believe them to be. But that's just not the case. The truth is the fascists won last year. They’re currently in power and they don’t need extrajudicial foot-soldiers to do their bidding because they already have an army of law enforcement ready and willing to use every tool they have and build new ones to oppress people.

While ICE does have "Citizens Academies," where they train civilians to wield firearms and surveil their neighbors, they are mainly for public relations purposes. DHS doesn't have the authority to deputize people outside of the 287(g) program.[[1]] Meanwhile, cases of people impersonating federal immigration officers are extremely few and far between across the country.

There's just simply no proof to what these people believe.

I understand the impulse to believe that things have not gotten as bad as they are. However, the idea that heavily armed law enforcement would never don masks to disappear somebody off the street can only be believed by people who have refused to pay attention to the United States’ history. They have been inculcated by decades of pro-cop propaganda into believing that cops (understood to be all types of federal, state, and local law enforcement) are ultimately the thin blue line that stands between them and the horrors. If that’s your belief system, then it’s easy to think that cops could never be the ones perpetrating the horrors. But they are.

When people believe conspiracy theories, they do so because it makes the world seem more straightforward than it actually is and they want to exert some small sense of control over a world that’s gone mad. The conspiracy explains the world and allows them to integrate whatever experience they’re going through into an already existing worldview without it being changed.

This same cognitive dissonance is what has allowed these people to believe the government’s actions under Trump are a temporary aberration of the rules-based order and not its natural evolution. It’s what allowed them to look at Biden or Obama, named the “deporter-in-chief” during his term, and ignore everything horrible they did because they were on the right team. To them, there were no concentration camps at the border or masked men kidnapping migrants before 2016 and between 2020 and 2024. They just magically popped up when Trump came into office, and those two presidents didn’t approve the laws that allowed this to happen. Along the same lines, it allowed them to ignore everything Kamala Harris did that ultimately cost her the election and instead blame her loss on Palestinians, people of color, the trans community, etc…

They continue to twist themselves into knots because they refuse to understand what is going on around them. They insist on blaming an outside organization, like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or what have you, because it allows them to continue believing that the American government is not rotten to the core. 

For example, these people say that ICE must be civilians masquerading as cops because they are wearing masks and are dressed like soldiers, which is exactly what Proud Boys have been sporting at pretty much every protest they’ve been at. However, BlueAnon has their flow of fashion aesthetics backwards.

Since at least the War on Drugs, all types of law enforcement have gotten more militarized. This change was supercharged by the War on Terror. When you combine the waterfall of equipment with the worship of “tactical” units like SWAT or Special Forces, every law enforcement officer down to the lowliest sheriff’s deputy is kitted out like a character from Rainbow Six Siege[[2]]. Naturally, all of this training, equipment, and funding has been repurposed for the War on Migrants. Right-wing paramilitary organizations love to fashion themselves off of the military and cops, which is why they have stolen the style even if they would have washed out of basic training in the second week.

You don’t even have to look that far back to see similar tactics being deployed by law enforcement en masse. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, masked federal officers kidnapped people into unmarked vans. At the time, Trump threatened to expand those tactics nationwide, and now he’s making good on that promise via immigration enforcement.

When it comes to the masks that people love to point out as the smoking gun, it’s the same thing. Law enforcement at all levels began wearing masks because they did not want people to identify them. Proud Boys and other right wing paramilitary groups do it for the same reason. That is the one thing they definitely share, neither want their faces out there because it’s a deterrent against them continuing to do what they’re doing. If the lady who serves you coffee, your check out clerk at Costco, and your neighbor know you’re part of the fascist crackdown, you’ll be ostracized from society. 

I’ve heard people say ICE wears the masks because they want to be intimidating to people. While I do not want to downplay the very real threat they pose, it’s more likely they are the ones intimidated by the prospect of their faces being out there and the possibility of societal backlash. 

That’s why they've gone so hard against anybody who dares reveal their names and faces to the world. They try to claim it’s because it puts their agents in danger because of all the “violent criminals” they face, but that’s just not true. They’re rolling up to restaurants and construction site’s forty deep, each with a balaclava, because they’re scared people will know who they really are. They know the vast majority of people find their actions abhorrent and they’re scared to be identified.

People have started to recognize this. Across the country people are realizing ICE and other law enforcement are scared of them when they work together and stand their ground. People have been pushing back against their neighbors being detained and deported. While law enforcement claims they’re facing off against drug dealers and gun runners, middle aged people with attitude recording on their phones have managed to make them retreat in San Diego:

This can be replicated across the country, but people have to know who they’re fighting against in order to be able to combat them effectively. By no means am I saying that BlueAnon folks should tone down the hatred they feel when they’re posting online about their little conspiracy theory, but they should internalize the truth of what's happening then redirect it towards the people actually doing the things they're decrying.

And to do that, they need to replace the copaganda framework that has misled them into believing that cops and the state are fundamentally good entities. If they look back at previous instances where armed and masked men have disappeared people across the country, maybe they'll come to believe what millions of people have been shouting in the streets for decades: all cops are bastards.

[[1]]: There's an offshoot of this conspiracy theory that claims the ones doing the raids are private military contractors deputized by DHS. While PMCs have pitched to aid the Trump administration in carrying out its mass deportation plan, there is no evidence they are the ones doing the physical apprehension of migrants.

[[2]]: If you want to learn more about the militarization of police, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces is a foundational book about this topic. It has informed much of the thinking behind this piece, as well as my view of cops in general.