“Why were state law enforcement officers excluded?” U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder wanted to know.
The judge pressed California Deputy Atty. Gen. Cameron Bell to explain the thinking behind a pair of trailblazing new laws meant to unmask the federal immigration agents patrolling Golden State streets and compel them to identify themselves.
One of the laws required all law enforcement operating in the state to visibly display identification while on duty, with narrow exclusions for plainclothes, undercover and SWAT details. It applied to everyone else, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
But the other law, a ban on masks worn by on-duty law enforcement officers, applied only to local cops and federal agents, with a broad exemption for the California Highway Patrol and other state peace officers.
Snyder wanted to know: Why were the laws different?
She never got an answer. Bell said she couldn’t comment on the actions of the Legislature.
State Sen. Scott Wiener attends the California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco in February.
(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
In the halls of the statehouse last year, Sen. Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) No Secret Police Act and Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez’s (D-Alhambra) No Vigilantes Act were referred to as “legislative twins,” a nod to their shared gestation and conjoined legal fate. If passed, both would immediately be challenged by the Trump administration.
That’s precisely what happened. Both measures became law — but only the ID law survived its first court battle, sending state legislators back to the drawing board on the mask ban.
Polls show unmasking ICE is overwhelmingly popular with voters, and both Wiener and Gov. Gavin Newsom took credit for getting the bill passed.
But behind the scenes, according to nearly two dozen sources familiar with the legislative process who spoke to The Times, a fight had been brewing between the two Democrats.
Days before the amendment deadline last summer, Newsom’s office proposed changes to Wiener’s mask ban that, according to legal experts and opponents, would have exempted most ICE and Customs and Border Protection operations from the bill. The governor’s team denies that was the intent of their proposal. The resulting compromise exempted state peace officers from the law instead.
Snyder struck it down on Feb. 9, writing that she was “constrained” to do so because the exemption of state police “unlawfully discriminates against federal officers.”
Interviews with more than 20 lawmakers, policy advisors, law enforcement and legal experts show how the Labor Day weekend deal came together, ensuring both Wiener and the governor a political victory that in short order became a court triumph for the president.
There are now more than a dozen similar bills winding through statehouses from Olympia, Wash., to Albany, N.Y., as legislators try to rein in a practice the majority of Americans see as dangerous and corrosive. In Sacramento, similar efforts are underway to pass a narrower version of the law, and both Newsom and Wiener have said they were proud to make California the first state to pass an ICE mask ban.
Both sides said the legislative process is messy, and that eleventh-hour amendment fights are inevitable in a statehouse where more than 900 bills were passed and close to 800 signed into law last year.
Yet neither the governor’s office nor the legislator’s team has offered clear answers for why both accepted a last-minute change on a nationally watched bill that each was informed could kneecap the law’s constitutional standing in court.
“Seeing the carve-out, I was immediately really surprised,” said Bridget Lavender, staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative, the nation’s leading expert on the myriad legal efforts to unmask ICE across the U.S. “That’s ultimately what doomed it.”
Others were more blunt.
“When I saw the final bill I said, ‘What happened here?’” said one prominent constitutional scholar, who asked not to be identified because they were advising several other state legislatures on similar mask ban efforts. “I can’t believe this happened.”
All eyes were really on California.
— Bridget Lavender, staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative
Legally, the mask ban was always going to be a cat fight. Law enforcement groups loathed it. Constitutional scholars were wary. The Justice Department contends both the mask ban and the ID law illegally interfere with the operation of the federal government, a violation of the Constitution’s supremacy clause, while California likens them to highway speed limits, which apply to everyone equally.
“There is a very strong argument that the law is constitutional so long as it applies to all law enforcement,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berekely Law School and an early champion of the original No Secret Police Act, known in Sacramento as SB 627.
Others saw it differently.
“It’s a very complicated question as to whether states can enact law enforcement policies that bind the federal government,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “The answer [here] is probably not. I regret that’s the law, but I’m pretty sure that’s the law.”
Everyone agreed, the Golden State would set the precedent.
“All eyes were really on California,” Lavender said.
Judge Snyder agreed with the state, upholding the ID law. Judges for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sharply questioned both the federal government and California in a hearing Tuesday, repeatedly emphasizing the lack of clear precedent and constitutional uncertainty of the law.
“California has done something that we just haven’t seen before,” said Judge Jacqueline Nguyen.
Most scholars believe it will ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court.
The mask ban would be on the same track now, if not for the state police exemption.
“We knew we really had to thread that needle very carefully,” said state Sen. Patricia Fahy of New York, whose mask ban bill could soon be fast-tracked in Albany. “You had to put all law enforcement in it. I say that as a non-lawyer, but I knew that.”
Wiener knew it too. A Harvard-trained lawyer and a former deputy city attorney for San Francisco, he’d rebuffed early requests to exempt state and local officers from the bill and circulated Chemerinsky’s July 23 op-ed in the Sacramento Bee explaining the necessity of a universal ban, including to the governor’s team.
The state’s powerful law enforcement unions were livid. They railed against the bill in public and in the Legislature, testifying relentlessly about the harm that would flow to them from a ban — including being required to enforce it against armed federal agents.
“The last thing you want is two people with firearms on their hips getting into an argument,” said Marshall McClain, a regional director in the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, among the state’s richest and most powerful lobbying groups.
Law enforcement objections shaped the changes the governor’s legislative office sought just days before the Sept. 5 amendment deadline, according to a stakeholder involved in those discussions.
Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference in Los Angeles in 2024.
(Eric Thayer / Associated Press)
The most controversial ask from Newsom’s team was an exemption for all types of officers engaged in “warrant and arrest related operations” — precisely the type of enforcement Alex Pretti was filming when masked CBP agents tackled him to the ground and shot him to death in Minneapolis last month.
The governor’s office also sought an exemption for all officers engaged in “crowd management, intervention, and control” — the work ICE agent Jonathan Ross was doing when he shot and killed Renee Good less than three weeks earlier.
“We were working to ensure state officer safety and operational effectiveness, not exempt ICE,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, Newsom’s chief deputy director of communications.
Yet California Deputy Solicitor Gen. Mica Moore told the 9th Circuit on Tuesday that the state’s ID law only applies to officers engaged in “arrest or detention operations or … crowd control” — activities she characterized as central to its purpose.
Rather than swallow bad terms or risk Newsom’s veto, Wiener countered with the state police carve-out — a move constitutional experts advised him would leave the law at least some chance of survival.
The governor’s legislative team quickly accepted, leaving Bell and the attorney general’s office on the hook to defend the exemption.
Boosters argue that even with its fatal flaw, California’s law advanced such bans nationally in a pivotal moment last September.
“The politics have changed dramatically,” said Hector Villagra, vice president of policy advocacy for MALDEF, one of the mask ban’s sponsors. “[Today] people realize this is not normal in a democracy like ours.”
WASHINGTON — A dispute over whether federal immigration agents should be allowed to wear masks during enforcement operations has become one of the biggest obstacles to keeping the Department of Homeland Security funded, pushing the government toward a partial shutdown early Saturday.
Democrats have described the practice as corrosive to public trust, arguing that masked agents create the appearance of a “secret police” force. Republican lawmakers, President Trump and his top advisors, meanwhile, have drawn a hard line against requiring officers to remove their face coverings, insisting that doing so would expose them to harassment, threats and online doxxing.
“They want our law enforcement to be totally vulnerable and put them in a lot of danger,” Trump said at a White House event Thursday. He added that it would be “very, very hard to approve” Democrats’ demands, such as unmasking federal officers.
The standoff over masking stalled negotiations as lawmakers raced to meet a funding deadline for the Department of Homeland Security at midnight Friday. Without a deal, key agency functions — from airport security to disaster relief coordination — could be affected if the shutdown drags on.
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) rides the Senate subway Thursday ahead of the latest partial government shutdown.
(Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As with every shutdown, the agency’s essential functions will continue to operate, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant Homeland Security secretary for public affairs, said in a statement. But employees performing those functions at agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Transportation Security Administration could go without pay if the shutdown stretches for weeks.
The heads of those agencies told the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday that the shutdown is expected to create severe and lasting challenges.
Vice Adm. Thomas Allan, the acting vice commandant of the Coast Guard, said a shutdown would delay maintenance for boats and aircraft, and halt pay for 56,000 active-duty reserve and civilian personnel. Ha Nguyen McNeill, acting administrator of TSA, recounted how the last government shutdown affected her workers and spiked wait times at airports.
“We heard reports of officers sleeping in their cars at airports to save money on gas, selling their blood and plasma and taking on second jobs to make ends meet,” she said, adding that some are still recovering from the financial impact.
Operations within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — the agencies that are central to the budget impasse — are likely to be the least affected. That’s because both agencies still have access to $75 billion in funding approved last year as part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
By midday Friday, it remained unclear when the partial shutdown would end, as lawmakers left Washington for a security conference in Munich and progress between Democratic and White House negotiators remained nebulous.
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters on Friday when asked about cutting a deal. “We always have to protect our law enforcement.”
The partial government shutdown comes at a moment of acute public anger at the agency’s approach to immigration enforcement, which has included the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.
But Democrats maintain that they need reforms written into law. Among their demands is requiring officers to wear and turn on body cameras, banning them from wearing masks, and ending the practice of “roving patrols” and instead requiring that they carry out only targeted operations.
“We will not support an extension of the status quo, a status quo that permits masked secret police to barge into people’s homes without warrants, no guardrails and zero oversight from independent authorities,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Thursday.
Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told a Senate panel Thursday that he does not want to see federal agents masked either, but said he is hesitant to bar face coverings because the threats to agents are too severe.
“I would work with this committee and any committee to work with holding individuals accountable that doxx ICE agents, because ICE agents don’t want to be masked,” Lyons said. “They’re honorable men and women, but the threats against their family are real.”
Federal immigration officials are more supportive of body cameras.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott told a House committee on Tuesday that he supports expanding the use of body cameras, but said more funding is needed to hire personnel to oversee the rollout.
“Fund the entire program so that we can be transparent and that we can make sure America knows what we’re doing, because that trust is critically important,” he said.
Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said that while the White House has made some “tweaks around oversight,” its actions continue to fall short.
The association, which represents 18,000 immigration attorneys, has urged Congress to refuse more funding for ICE and CBP before implementing reforms.
“The American public wants and deserves real, meaningful guardrails that are written into law that ensure this administration — and, quite frankly, any administration — will abide by the Constitution and respect fundamental principles of due process,” Johnson said Wednesday on a call with reporters.
“Congress has a critical opportunity right now to meet that demand,” he added.
Republican Sens. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky talk during a hearing Thursday on oversight of federal immigration agencies.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
So far, Democrats maintain they will continue to bock funding bills without accountability measures in place.
California’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, were among the Senate Democrats who helped block passage of funding bills Thursday that would have averted a shutdown because they lacked accountability measures.
“I will not support more funding for ICE until there are new guardrails to rein in its lawless conduct,” Schiff wrote on X. “I’m a no on anything but real reform.”
Padilla said he would be a “firm no” until lawmakers agree that federal immigration officers need to be held accountable.
“Donald Trump and Republicans want Americans to forget about their lawless immigration roundup, but we won’t,” Padilla said.
Moth has made it to the final of The Masked Singer but the mystery star, whose identity is not yet know, couldn’t hold back the tears after performing a Disney song
Moth gave an emotional rendition of a Disney classic
Moth burst into tears following their performance on The Masked Singer. The mystery celebrity, who has made it to the final of the hit ITV competition series, gave a rendition of Colours of the Wind from Pocahontas, originally sung by Judy Kuhn in the 19995 animation.
Following the performance, judges Davina McCall, Mo Gilligan, Maya Jama and and Jonathan Ross were clearly moved and Davina noted just how “emotional” it was.
She added: “That was really breathtaking. Stunning. Thank you!” It was then that Moth could be heard quietly crying underneath the costume. Mo heard it and said: “I don’t know if Moth is crying under there?” to which the star nodded. Mo exlaimed: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Now I’m going to cry!”
Davina added: “That really was something else, thank you” and Moth received a huge round of applause from the audience. This all happened just moments before JLS star Marvin Humes was unmasked, having been performing as Can of Worms for weeks.
Speaking after his exit from the show, Marvin, who is married to fellow pop star and presenter Rochelle Humes, said: “That was the whole thing. When I talked about doing the show, I wanted to be completely across the board. My first song was Be Our Guest from Beauty and the Beast.
“It’s a big tune to be fair. And then Ghostbusters and then Temperature. Then Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Pure Imagination, which is one of my favourite songs.
“I drive my kids mad singing that at home when we’re watching the movie. And then tonight, Cha Cha Slide. Who doesn’t love Cha Cha Slide ?”
Marvin, who has also had a host of presenting gigs on programmes like This Morning and The Hit List, shot to fame as part of JLS on The X Factor in 2008, and they launched a greatest hits tour last year, but admitted that it was “strange” to have performed solo for the first time in a while.
He said: “Do you know what, what’s really strange for me is I haven’t sung by myself in a long time. I’m used to being with three other guys on stage and that’s quite a comfort. A bit of security. Although I’m completely masked, it’s still been quite strange being out on my own singing.
His exit came as part of double elimination, along with TV presenter Ben Fogle, who had been singing as Sloth. Despite not being a singer, Ben later explained that he just embraced the opportunity and loved getting the chance to cover a theatre classic.
He said: “I really enjoyed it. I’ve never done any singing, but I really loved doing it. Actually, there was one song, which was actually my sing-off song, Flash Bang Wallop from Half a Sixpence, for me, that was the song I really wanted to do because my mother was in the original musical.
“I remember watching it as a child, multiple times, and that song was just so joyous. So to get to sing that on a stage, in front of an audience with no one knowing who I was, was super super fun.
The Masked Singer finale airs Saturday at 7pm on ITV1 and ITVX.Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs onTikTok,Snapchat,Instagram,Twitter,Facebook,YouTubeandThreads.
