ICE Claims Agents Need to Wear Masks Due to Assaults. Here’s the Truth

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have claimed multiple times since May that there’s been a 413 percent increase in assaults against their agents to justify their officers wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves. The data states otherwise. 

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump penned a column asserting the obvious—ICE officers are covering their faces and wearing plainclothes while they kidnap people off the street to “avoid accountability” and make it “harder to say precisely who had plucked up a college student or local mother and sent them to jail in another state.”  

Bump first raised the question in May in an article that had acting ICE Director Todd Lyons so incensed that he wrote a letter to the editor claiming a staggering increase in assaults, writing “officers wear masks for personal protection and to prevent doxing.… Since President Donald Trump returned to office, ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”

The use of a percentage here is very intentional, as it’s easier to inflate and sensationalize. “A 413 percent increase could mean that the number of assaults went from 200 in 2024 to 1,026 in 2025—or that it went from eight to 41.… There’s a big difference between an increase of 826 assaults and an increase of 33—especially if some of those ‘assaults’ are of the Lander variety,” wrote Bump, who dug into the claim in a piece published Thursday.

Bump found that assaults on agents had decreased every month since 2024 and, despite repeated requests to ICE, wasn’t given any proof of ICE agents being doxxed, targeted, or assaulted outside the context of an immigration arrest. 

The organization that has conducted countless raids and crackdowns, kidnapped innocent people off the street, and handcuffed elected officials, is now trying to frame itself as the victim so that its officers can continue to feel big and strong behind the anonymity of their masks. 

“We should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. That the organization would not provide evidence for its claims … diminishes the extent to which we should grant ICE the benefit of the doubt,” Bump wrote. “Leaving the question I posed in May: Why are these officers covering their faces if not to avoid accountability?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants the Pentagon to tone any commemoration of Juneteenth way, way down, in keeping with his anti-diversity crusade.

Hegseth’s office requested the Department of Defense take “a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging,” according to an email obtained by Rolling Stone. The Pentagon’s office of the chief of public affairs also said in the email it won’t publish Juneteenth-related material online on Thursday.

Juneteenth marks the official last day of slavery in the United States. After the Civil War ended, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to free the last enslaved people in the country. President Joe Biden signed a law making Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021. The bill passed with widespread bipartisan support in the House and a unanimous vote in the Senate.

The White House did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment about Hegseth’s directive. A Pentagon official said the DOD “may engage in the following activities, subject to applicable department guidance: holiday celebrations that build camaraderie and esprit de corps; outreach events (e.g., recruiting engagements with all-male, all-female, or minority-serving academic institutions) where doing so directly supports DOD’s mission; and recognition of historical events and notable figures where such recognition informs strategic thinking, reinforces our unity, and promotes meritocracy and accountability.”

It’s a little surprising that Hegseth didn’t choose to do away with marking Juneteenth altogether. Since being sworn in, the defense secretary has repeatedly stated that “DEI is dead” at the Pentagon.

Hegseth has banned the DOD from marking identity months such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and Pride Month. In February, the Pentagon was directed to scrub its website of all “news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The DOD removed web pages about the Tuskegee Airmen, the World War II accomplishments of Jackie Robinson, and the Navajo Code Talkers, among others—although these were restored after widespread scrutiny.

Hegseth has also insisted on changing the names of military bases that were once named after Confederate figures. The bases were renamed following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and Hegseth is now working to revert the base names back to the pro-slavery ones.

Donald Trump insists that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon, despite repeated statements to the contrary from his own intelligence officials. But rather than listen, the U.S. president is twisting reality to suit his plans.

The White House posted a video Wednesday of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March. Gabbard was delivering the Annual Threat Assessment from the U.S. intelligence community.

“In the past year, we’ve seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus,” Gabbard says in the clip. “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

But the clip conveniently leaves out what Gabbard said just a few moments before that soundbite. As shown in Gabbard’s full testimony, the text of which is available on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence website, she actually says Iran is not close to developing a nuclear weapon.

“The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said immediately before the quote posted by the White House.

As Donald Trump seemingly rampages closer to ordering U.S. forces to attack Iran, he has sidelined Gabbard in his decision-making process. Trump has gone so far as to say he “didn’t care” about his own government’s assessment that Iran is still years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Instead, Trump says Iran is“very close to having it,” parroting rhetoric from the Israeli government, which has repeatedly insisted on Iran’s burgeoning nuclear capabilities as a flimsy justification for the massive military operation that has already killed at least 639 people, according to human rights activists.

Gabbard, for her part, has caved willingly enough: Gabbard told CNN Tuesday that Trump “was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March.” So it seems that Trump didn’t need to edit Gabbard’s words, after all—she’s more than happy to lie for him on her own.

To be clear, this entire horrific situation could have been avoided if Trump had kept the U.S. in the Iran nuclear deal. Trump left the agreement in 2018 simply because it had been forged under his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

Two of the highest-ranking military Cabinet members have essentially been cut off as Trump teeters on the edge of joining Israel’s war on Iran, according to a report from The Washington Post.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, two people who you’d expect to be closely involved with the potential wartime situation, have been kicked to the curb in favor of his “tier one” advisory group on Iran, which includes Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine.

While Israel has bombarded Iran based on unsubstantiated nuclear weapons claims, Trump has yet to confirm U.S.-led military strikes on Iran, which could lead to global fallout. Reports Wednesday indicated that Trump has approved strikes but not yet given the final green light.

Hegseth has struggled to establish trust and consistency while leading the Pentagon, a job he was nearly disqualified from in the first place. Now it seems clear that the president does not take him seriously as a leader or confidant. “Nobody is talking to Hegseth,” one official told the Post. “There is no interface operationally between Hegseth and the White House at all.”

Trump has made his distaste for Gabbard much clearer, especially after she posted a three-minute-long X video last week that went mostly unnoticed at the time but now appears to be an obvious rebuke of U.S. support for Israel’s war on Iran.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump stated on Tuesday when asked about Gabbard’s video, on Air Force One. “I think they were very close to having a weapon.”

While Gabbard’s booting from the inner circle seems to be ideology-based, Hegseth’s shunning feels like a competency and trust issue. Either way, the country’s two top defense leaders are not involved in discussions around starting a massive war, which points to a troubling level of internal discord and disunity, especially just months into Trump’s first year as president.

Donald Trump slammed a Fox News poll Thursday on Truth Social, accusing the network’s pollsters of being “always wrong and negative.”

“The Crooked FoxNews Polls got the Election WRONG, I won by much more than they said I would, and have been biased against me for years,” Trump wrote, referring to the 2020 election, which Fox correctly said that he lost. “It’s why MAGA HATES FoxNews, even though their anchors are GREAT.”

“I hate FAKE pollsters, one of the Worst, but Fox will never change their discredited pollster!” he added.

A Fox News poll released Wednesday shows that a majority of voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance by an eight-point margin. The poll, regarded as one of the best in the industry, found that a majority of voters are still feeling pessimistic about the state of the economy. 

Just Tuesday, the Federal Reserve forecasted higher inflation as business owners and consumers start to feel the impact of the president’s sweeping tariffs. On inflation specifically, Trump’s job approval is underwater by 30 points, with just 34 percent of voters approving of his performance on the price-level.

When it comes to the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” congressional Republicans’ sprawling package of tax cuts and health care “reforms” that the president has put his full weight behind, the poll found Americans oppose the measure by a large margin. According to the poll, nearly three in four independents oppose the measure, as do the vast majority of Democrats. 

The majority of voters across the spectrum disapprove of the president’s job on immigration and foreign policy, as his response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and a collapse in diplomatic negotiations with Iran has dominated headlines.