In Minneapolis and St. Paul, as in cities across the United States, immigration raids became a massive, unprecedented spectacle of masked men clad in tactical gear — Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shielded by body armor and a bureaucracy that is willing to use brutal tactics and to misrepresent their activities and the people they engage. ICE agents arrive unbidden and largely unwelcome, without names, wielding lethal weapons and tear gas cannisters, and pepper-spraying neighborhoods where fear has become epidemic as it eviscerates trust in the federal government.

ICE’s anonymity is not incidental — it is a tool of domination that reshapes the moral landscape and dampens the humanity of those who use it.

When power and anonymity combine

Social psychologists have studied what happens when power combines with concealment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in 1971 by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, starkly illuminated disturbing realities. In it, college students were assigned to act as guards — or prisoners. The guards, who wore uniforms and mirrored sunglasses, devolved into cruelly treating the other students playing the role of prisoners. The guards’ anonymity unleashed aggression in them.

Stripped of their personal identifiers and identity, guards stopped seeing prisoners as people and went on to treat them without the humanity that all deserve.

The experiment ended early because the researchers became alarmed by how fast previously ordinary people devolved into violence when shielded from accountability.

ICE operations perilously mirror these psychological dynamics on a national scale. Masked agents with obscured names and covered faces drive in vehicles with darkly tinted windows, creating a hostile environment that suppresses empathy they might otherwise retain and levels of accountability that might restrain them. Unlike in Zimbardo’s lab, these are not simulations — we witness in plain view across our community and via screens the jarring consequences of ICE actions: abuses, deportations, family separations, and traumas that ripple through homes, communities, and across generations.

Supporters of ICE actions might argue that agents should not identify themselves because their anonymity protects them from retaliation. But in a democracy, protection of agents’ identity must be balanced carefully with accountability to the public and to potential victims whom they may wrong.

Why should ICE agents be masked when other law enforcement officers are not?

In this country, unlike in dictatorships, people expect to be able to identify law enforcement officers by sight and by badge number. When ICE agents can detain, harass, deport, injure, shoot and, as we have seen, even kill without identifying themselves, they have been granted too much power in the conflicts that they are waging against immigrants and citizens alike. It is not justice when ICE agents operate behind masks that obscure their identity and unleash base instincts of cruelty and violence rather than upholding values of protecting and serving that are expected of other law enforcement.

Mission gone awry

The Stanford Prison Experiment ended after merely six days.

ICE’s misadventures and cruelty are ongoing and have spiraled out of control here and elsewhere. Society and elected representatives with moral compasses and courage must end this dubious, deadly, costly and unnecessary mission that has gone awry and that has employed tactics that dehumanize immigrants, citizens, and erode the humanity of ICE agents themselves.

William N. Robiner is a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics and director of Health Psychology at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Related Articles

Joe Soucheray: If ICE returns to Minnesota, it had better do things differently

Your Money: Career pivots: The financial side of seeking greener pastures

Working Strategies: Choosing your post-60 career path

Real World Economics: Warsh would inherit Powell’s dilemma

Letters: Don’t mistake TIF subsidies for real growth in St. Paul