Secret Police and Secret Courts: The Trump Administration Withholds Names of Immigration Prosecutors, Taking a Great Leap Forward Toward a Police State

Jul 15, 2025

In a free society, the law is enforced out in the open, subject to public scrutiny. In a dictatorship, there are secret police and secret courts. With ICE agents wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves, we have already taken the first step in that direction. Here is the next step: Trump administration immigration prosecutors are now refusing to identify themselves in court.

The Intercept describes this extraordinary situation:

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.
“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.
As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning.
“I’ve never heard of someone in open court not being identified,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. “Part of the court’s ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government.”

This is a good opportunity to remind everyone that immigration judges are not real judges. They are not independent of the immigration enforcement apparatus—they are its creatures and serve as its pliant lackeys.

The next step after this will be secret charges and secret trials. With some detainees, including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, already disappearing into the immigration police state and being detained and deported with no record or legal process, we’re almost all the way there.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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