Last Friday, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a GOP campaign consultant named Brad Todd. He says he’s the one who coined that phrase about taking Trump “literally but not seriously.” The big argument of the piece I think actually makes no sense or represents a kind of denial. But there are building blocks to it that capture key insights about immigration policy in the United States. The gist of Todd’s argument is that Trump’s immigration agenda was a big political winner in 2024 and has actually been very successful in practice — dramatically reducing the number of entries via the southern border. The problem is that it’s being overshadowed and the support for it is being wrecked by Trump sending ICE on these wilding sprees into blue cities.

My view is a bit different. I don’t know if Todd is in denial or willfully obtuse or maybe less than fully leveling with readers. But I don’t think this is actually what’s happening. Nobody foisted Stephen Miller or the whole “mass deportation” policy on Trump. Other than perhaps the concept of tariffs it’s the most organic and natural thing to him. It’s more accurate to say that the energy of MAGA is all about mass deportation and perhaps even more than mass deportation the assaultive cleansing of American society, of both those who are “illegal” and/or brown, but also white people whom through various forms of sexual license, gayness, uppity womenhood and non-traditionalism, are collectively standing in the way of Making America Great Again. “Closing the border” or “securing the border” is just the packaging the gets you electorally to 50%. Because that’s something quite a lot of Americans for a variety of reasons want to do. In other words, wilding sprees aren’t inadvertently driving down support for Trump immigration policies. The actual MAGA policy is “mass deportation” and ICE wilding sprees and it’s unpopular. The border rhetoric is popular but that’s neither here nor there.

Masks have become the central symbol of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement wilding sprees across America in 2025. They are emblems of a secret police. Their gaiters and balaclavas convey menace. But their central justification is the idea that the agents themselves are endangered by their work, that their identities must be kept secret because they are endangered by the very public they menace while at least notionally working to serve and protect. The general argument is that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents risk being “doxxed,” being identified and having their private information and home addresses made public. But the word has been the subject to an absurd expansion. Earlier this week I heard an anecdote about a group of ICE agents who were eating at a Minneapolis restaurant. A right-wing account said the agents were then “doxxed,” which in this case meant that activists saw them and sent out word to other activists who then started protesting outside the restaurant.

It’s remarkable how accepted this purported need for anonymity has become. Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has become increasingly outspoken about ICE and called for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to lose her job. But he still thinks ICE agents should remain masked because of this fear of “doxxing.” A bunch of the country seems to have forgotten that even the most abusive of metropolitan departments require their officers to show their faces and wear name tags as a matter of course.

In this post I want to dig more into that rationale: that the people who are entrusted with the power to wield legitimate violence to serve the public need special protection, special rights to privacy and anonymity in order to do so. What is implicit in this claim is that ICE needs to do its work in a highly abusive manner, or perhaps even that its work is to be as abusive as possible. Why else do they need to be more anonymous than your average beat cop? If they’re going to get a lot of people mad, it just follows that they need some additional protection from the consequences of generating that kind of anger.

Needless to say this argument treads a pretty slippery slope.