A Complication of Masks

The “No Secret Police Act” sounds good on its face, but beneath may lie the groundwork for greater harm

California’s recently signed “No Secret Police Act” will do little to protect immigrants from violent immigration enforcement, but it may very well put more immigrants, and all Californians, further in harm’s way.

SB 627 (Wiener) seeks to ban federal and local law enforcement, including ICE, from wearing face masks while performing their official duties, with some exceptions. While the second Trump Administration is absolutely engaged in a horrifying escalation of the capricious violence and state terror inflicted against immigrant communities, SB 627 will have little to no tangible effect on the safety or well-being of immigrants in California.

Setting aside the legal questions about whether it can even be enforced against federal agents, I am deeply skeptical that the masked anonymity of individual ICE agents is why immigrant households are immobilized with fear. Rather, immigrant communities are terrified by the inherently cruel act of state-directed kidnappings of parents in front of their children, in the privacy of their cars and homes, at schools and churches, and at their jobs. Whether the kidnappers are masked is a sinister detail amidst a cascade of trauma. SB 627 is a performative attempt to make immigration enforcement feel less scary to non-immigrant witnesses but makes it no less violent or harmful to immigrant communities’ well-being.

Proponents argue that the public should have the right to personally identify government agents. However, SB 627 exempted the entire California Highway Patrol, who, though prohibited from enforcing federal immigration law, were recently deployed to Los Angeles to assist in quelling pro-immigrant demonstrations. SB 627 was also signed on the same day that SB 805 (Perez) the “No Vigilantes Act,” was signed. SB 805 requires clear identification by all law enforcement operating in California, such as a name or badge number. SB 805 seems to more clearly address the concerns around public transparency and personal accountability of law enforcement in California – why was SB 627 additionally necessary, given SB 805’s goals?

While claiming to be pro-immigrant policy, SB 627 is likely a test balloon for the political viability of a civilian mask ban as way to advance the surveillance state – a bipartisan policy goal across the country, and one that has already lead to an indictment of a pro-immigrant protestor handing out face shields. Several Democratic leaders and lawmakers, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, have previously called for mask bans as a means of controlling pro-Palestine dissent. Additionally, as the public’s access to healthcare of all kinds, including vaccines, continues to be threatened, we should oppose any government action that limits or places barriers on our ability and ease to protect ourselves from ongoing and increasing threats of airborne illnesses and pollution.

Do we really want an ableist, oppressive state deciding who needs a mask, which mask is appropriate, and when it is acceptable to wear one? As a disabled person who relies on medical masks to access shared public spaces more safely, I am highly skeptical of “medical exemptions” in any type of mask ban. Medical exemptions do not meaningfully mitigate the harm that people in masks will experience when they are detained, questioned, or otherwise harassed by law enforcement or even private individuals in non-protest spaces like store managers, school staff, or healthcare workers. Furthermore, not all high-risk and disabled people can access a high-quality respirator, and cheaper, more ubiquitous surgical masks are better than no protection against infections. This means poor folks, who are also more likely to be disabled and people of color, who cannot access a high-quality respirator are more likely to be subjected to additional scrutiny and harassment. A mask ban is a pretext not only for further state surveillance, but also permission for a non-disabled public to be suspicious and hostile toward disabled people.

Though they continue to be politicized and co-opted by non-disabled people for non-medical purposes, masks are still an essential accommodation for high-risk and disabled people from further disability and death during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Disabled people as a group are disproportionately at risk for negative health outcomes, including death, from a COVID-19 infection. Preventing infection is also presently the only reliable means of preventing Long COVID, a disabling chronic health condition disproportionately impacting Black, Latiné, and LGBTQ+ people. Given that 40-60% of COVID-19 transmission is still asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic, universal masking by everyone able makes all public spaces more inclusive, accessible, and safe, especially for disabled and high-risk people.

In 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the quiet part out loud while talking about the relative number of COVID-19 cases going down from their peak in 2021: “…you’ll find the vulnerable will fall by the wayside – they’ll get infected, they’ll get hospitalized and some will die.” I reject this concession to ongoing mass disability and death, as if the vulnerable, disabled people, are acceptable tradeoffs for “you do you,” and “back to normal.” We, the vulnerable, the disabled, the elderly, deserve to protect ourselves, and have our communities, including our comrades in justice work, protect us from a preventable, transmissible disease that continues to further disable and kill us violently and needlessly.

I am the grandchild of Mexican immigrants – my grandfather’s labor was exploited through the Bracero program, and he luckily avoided being kidnapped in 1953-1954’s’ “Operation Wetback” – surely inspiration for the Trump Administration’s current terror campaign. Immigration enforcement, like all the United States’ law enforcement, does not protect public safety, but rather is an inherently violent tool to systematically marginalize and oppress immigrants, people of color, poor, and disabled people.

Instead of setting the stage for a civilian mask ban that will inevitably harm activists, disabled people, and immigrants, SB 657 should have made a sincere attempt at mitigating the concrete harms of immigration enforcement without opening a viable path to policing an essential public health protection. In light of other policy choices California has made this legislative session, including balancing our state budget by restricting healthcare for immigrants, and leaving it to individual localities to provide immigrants rent relief, a mask ban for ICE feels even more trivial. California can and must do better to secure the safety and well-being of immigrants and disabled people – a mask ban is not it.

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Angela M. Vázquez, MSW is a children’s advocate and health justice activist disabled by Long COVID. She is the Advocacy Director over the mental health policy portfolio for The Children’s Partnership and serves on the Board of Directors of Disability Rights California.