Renée Good was a United States citizen. She was shot and killed by a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. Two weeks later, on January 21, the city of St. Paul announced plans for an ordinance requiring the federal agents operating in its streets to show their faces. That is the sequence the Justice Department is now suing over — a killing, followed by a city’s decision that anonymous armed men are incompatible with self-government. Eleven lawsuits to date, and this is the origin story they want the courts to strike from the record.
Eight states. Nine cities. Denver was sued last week. Maryland and two of its counties earlier this month. Connecticut back in May. Now St. Paul and Portland. Each case is a separate docket and the same question: may a city require the federal agents detaining its residents to identify themselves? The Justice Department’s answer is no — and it is spending the resources of the United States to make that answer stick, one municipality at a time, until the cities run out of money or courage.
Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal proposed that city’s ordinance in September 2025. St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her signed her measure into law in February, saying ICE was “causing confusion and undermining the relationship between the community and local police by obscuring their faces.” Both cities reached the same conclusion from different directions. Portland enforces civilly. St. Paul makes noncompliance a misdemeanor. Both are restrained. Both are the kind of measure a free city adopts when the federal government sends armed strangers into its neighborhoods and then tells the city it may not ask their names.
The Justice Department’s brief rests on the Supremacy Clause. That is not what the Supremacy Clause says. It makes federal law supreme when federal law is the law in force. It does not make federal agents supreme over the citizens they encounter. It does not convert a ski mask into an instrument of federal operations. An ICE agent in a face covering is not Article VI in the constitutional sense. He is a person with a gun, and the people standing in front of him have a right to know who he is and whom he works for. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. argues that states and localities “cannot enact laws that place the safety of federal law enforcement at risk and undermine federal operations authorized by Congress.” Read it slowly. The premise is upside down. The safety risk is created by the mask, not by the city that demands its removal. Every uniformed agency in the country — state police, local police, the United States military — operates identifiably and survives it. Identifiability does not endanger the officer. It endangers the officer’s impunity. Woodward’s formulation is the claim that the badge is incompatible with the job, and the entire country’s policing apparatus is the disproof.
U.S. Attorney Scott Bradford of Oregon says these ordinances “vilify” federal agents “for political purposes,” and he adds that the agents “live in our communities” and “their kids go to school in our communities.” He means it as a defense. It is the indictment. If federal agents live in the community and their children sit in its schools, then the community has a right to know which of its neighbors is detaining its other neighbors. Bradford has described the exact relationship that anonymity destroys. A neighbor who can look you in the eye and be recognized tomorrow morning does not get to vanish into a mask tonight. Bradford’s own argument for the agents’ belonging is the argument against their concealment.
Consider what the federal government is asking the courts to bless. Not a balancing of interests. Not a safety exemption. A rule that men with guns, operating in American cities, under American authority, may cover their faces so that no one can say afterward which men they were. The administration calls the cities’ ordinances nullification. Look at who is nullifying what. The cities are enforcing an old principle — that force in a republic is identifiable and answerable. The federal government is asserting a new one: that its agents answer to no one in the streets where they work. If that is constitutional, then the Constitution no longer describes a republic. It describes a license.
And here is what the lawsuits are actually for. The Justice Department is not going to win this argument on the ground, because on the ground the masked agents are losing it every night. This strategy is exhaustion, not law: file the eleventh suit, and the twelfth, and make each city calculate what defiance costs. The cities are pushing back anyway. They are right to push back. St. Paul wrote its ordinance after a masked federal agent killed a citizen two weeks earlier, and no brief from the Justice Department has ever explained why that mask had to stay on, what it protected, or whom it was for.
The arc on this one does not bend by itself. It bends when the ninth city refuses, and the tenth, and when a court is finally forced to answer a question no American court should have to answer: whether the men with guns may keep their faces hidden. Anonymity is not a safety measure. Anonymity is the precondition for impunity. The eleventh lawsuit is not an argument. It is the confession.