OAN Staff Blake Wolf
12:30 PM – Wednesday, November 5, 2025
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is calling on federal immigration agents to identify themselves during field raids, as criminals have reportedly begun posing as ICE officers while committing kidnappings and assaults.
The FBI recently issued a law-enforcement bulletin noting a spike in crimes committed by individuals impersonating agents. The bulletin states that the impersonators have carried out serious crimes — including robberies, kidnappings, and even sexual assaults — while posing as ICE officers.
“Due to the recent increase in ICE enforcement actions across the country, criminal actors are using ICE’s enhanced public profile and media coverage to their advantage to target vulnerable communities and commit criminal activity. This not only affects the victims and communities but also has broader negative consequences on law enforcement agencies,” the FBI wrote in the bulletin.
“These criminal impersonations make it difficult for the community to distinguish between legitimate officers conducting lawful law enforcement action and impostors engaging in criminal activity, which damages trust between the local community and law enforcement officers.”
The bulletin went on to note five separate instances in which criminals disguised as ICE officers committed heinous crimes.
In one instance, occurring in the state of Florida in April, a woman was kidnapped after agreeing to leave with a man who had identified himself as an ICE agent — although her intuition eventually kicked in and she was able to escape after being taken to an apartment. During another incident in Brooklyn in February, another criminal had impersonated an ICE agent, assaulted a woman during an attempted rape, then stole her purse and fled.
ICE agents have widely adopted the use of masks to protect their identities for safety reasons, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem.
However, despite ICE utilizing masks to protect themselves while fulfilling their job duties, critics have argued that the masks “erode public trust” while making it harder to identify whether the masked agents are actually federal officers or criminals posing as federal officers.
“Perceptions of police legitimacy are absolutely undermined when law enforcement is carried out by masked officers. But importantly, so is public safety,” Barry Friedman, the faculty director of the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, told Wired.
“Perceptions of legitimacy and public safety both require that community members trust the agencies tasked with protecting them. That’s all but impossible when officers are deliberately concealing their identities from the public,” he added.
Meanwhile, Border Czar Tom Homan has since emphasized that ICE officers must wear masks to shield their identities from doxxing threats, enabling them to safely conduct critical deportations of violent illegal aliens.
“These men and women put a gun on their hip and wear a Kevlar vest to go on the streets every day looking for the worst of the worst to make this country safer. Wearing a mask, if that protects them and protects your families, then that has to be done,” Homan stated. “I don’t particularly like the mask either.”
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