While the Trump administration loves to boast about its immigration crackdown, it’s not eager to share the details of who is doing the cracking. And now it’s not just Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who can hide their identities. Government lawyers representing ICE get to do so as well.
On Tuesday, The Intercept reported that at least two immigration judges are allowing government lawyers to hide their names. Does anyone else get to hide their names? Of course not. When Judge ShaSha Xu declared at the start of a hearing that “We’re not really doing names publicly,” she did so only after stating her name, the name of the immigrants, and the names of their lawyers. This is necessary, per Xu, because “privacy” and “things lately have changed.”
This is basically unheard of. Courts maintain a complete record of proceedings, and identifying the lawyers involved is a core part of that. Secret lawyers are just not a thing. This leaves immigrants unable even to identify who is pushing for them to be deported. But hey, some ICE attorneys think that it is “dangerous to state their names publicly,” and some immigration judges appear to agree.
You might be wondering why immigration judges would go along with this. Immigration judges aren’t appointed and confirmed by the Senate, and they are not part of the judicial branch. Rather, they are employees of the executive branch, so their hiring, firing, and duties are dictated by the administration. That’s why they are complicit in the ruses that the administration is using to make easy arrests.
In late May, immigration judges received a memo from the Department of Justice, telling them to let Department of Homeland Security lawyers make oral motions to dismiss, then grant the dismissal immediately. Once the immigrant leaves the courtroom, since they no longer have a pending immigration case, ICE arrests them and proceeds to deport them. If immigration judges will go along with that, there’s no reason to think they won’t let DHS attorneys stay anonymous.
While the move to make the courtroom process opaque is new, it builds on the administration’s allowing ICE agents to wear masks and obscure their identities. Can’t really have a secret police unless you also have a secret court, because the intent here is to deprive immigrants of the due process they are owed. Since the Supreme Court has blessed the idea of deporting detainees without a meaningful opportunity for them to challenge their removal, it’s pretty clear that they’re not going to restrain the administration.
The administration has justified keeping the identities of ICE agents secret because of an alleged spike in violence against them. However, that number is ever-shifting. First, the violence had increased by 300%, then by 413%, and then by 700%. When The Washington Post’s Philip Bump analyzed the data last month, he found that violence against Customs and Border Patrol agents was down compared with the same period in 2024, and that the number of incidents was very low. For example, in March 2025, there were 20 incidents of violence against CBP agents. In April, it was 32, and in May, 21. That’s why the administration keeps using percentages rather than raw numbers.
There are other ways the administration is working to cloak their illegal actions.
Immigration lawyers have allegedly been blocked from seeing their clients. Members of Congress have been refused entry to immigration facilities despite a law allowing them to access the centers, but the administration has fixed that by simply stating it will not follow the law. Lawmakers now must give DHS 72 hours’ notice before visiting an immigration facility, and DHS can deny them access for any reason or no reason.
The Justice Department even told a court on Tuesday that the police report of activist Mahmoud Khalil’s March arrest was privileged and that they wouldn’t provide it, because of the law enforcement privilege, which protects certain data when an investigation is ongoing. The judge was dumbfounded, pointing out they were trying to apply the privilege to something that already happened.
All of this is deeply anti-democratic. Secret courts, secret police, secret charges, secret deportations, secret facilities. The administration is building a parallel “justice” system for immigrants where everything is hidden from those it targets, where everyone colludes to facilitate illegal, swift, and brutal deportations. It’s the farthest thing from justice imaginable.