It’s 2026, and Democrats are still the party of masking. Now, of course, they oppose masking because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers often wear masks in the field. From 2020 to 2022, Democrats loved masks so much that Anthony Fauci told everyone to wear two. Well, after he said there was no reason to wear them. Democrats were also the party of the masked KKK, and they still are the party of masked antifa goons.

In other words, Democrats are just as hypocritical and inconsistent as ever.

Senate Democrats just torpedoed a full-year funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, meaning we’re headed for another partial government shutdown tonight at midnight ahead of a weeklong recess.

After the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats ramped up their litany of demands for reforms of ICE. One of them is to “prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.”

They say the masks shield agents from accountability for their actions, and that’s a somewhat sympathetic argument. It is unsettling to see masked and militarized federal agents in physical conflicts with American citizens. Provoking those confrontations is the Left’s strategy precisely because it yields the desired emotional response.

There should be proper and full investigations of Good and Pretti’s deaths, and accountability where appropriate.

However, the federal government understandably argues that masks protect agents from retribution. The Left has become so unhinged with political violence in recent years that it’s not a stretch at all to think the assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and OMB Director Russell Vought, as well as the successful murder of Charlie Kirk, would become a template for the kind of “accountability” ICE agents “deserve.” If a lunatic will assassinate the CEO of a health insurance company, you darn well better believe at least one will take action against ICE officers and their families.

“They want our law enforcement to be totally vulnerable and put them in a lot of danger,” Trump asserted.

Still, Chuck Wexler, the director of the Police Executive Research Forum, rightly notes, “There are two competing interests. The public’s right to know who police officers are, and the ICE agents’ fear for their own safety and that of their families.”

For now, that argument is about to shut down DHS.

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate yesterday, “I would work with this committee and any committee to work with holding individuals accountable that dox ICE agents because ICE agents don’t want to be masked. They’re honorable men and women. But the threats against their family are real.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seems to care a lot more about the people who are in our country illegally. “We will not support an extension of the status quo,” he thundered on the Senate floor, “that permits masked secret police to barge into people’s homes without warrants, no guardrails and zero oversight from independent authorities, a rogue police force that doesn’t obey the rules that every local police force and sheriff’s office must obey.”

Schumer’s sudden respect for the Rule of Law would be welcome if it weren’t so theatrically political.

“State law enforcement, local folks don’t [wear masks],” argued Representative Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the Committee for Homeland Security. “What’s so special about an ICE law enforcement agency that they have to wear a mask?”

Well, replied House Speaker Mike Johnson, “Unlike your local law enforcement in your hometown, ICE agents are being doxed and targeted. We have evidence of that.”

It seems to me we have a bit of a standoff. ICE agents have to wear masks because of the violent resistance of left-wing agitators. Those leftists say they’re resisting, in part, because ICE officers are wearing masks.

Who backs off first?

Despite Democrat hysterics, Republicans and Donald Trump’s administration are not fascists deploying jackbooted ICE/Gestapo thugs to round up innocent people. The primary targets for ICE and Border Patrol raids are illegal aliens with a criminal record beyond entering or staying in the country illegally. Every illegal alien is a criminal. Many have committed additional crimes, some of them violent and deadly.

Democrats aren’t terribly bothered by that, though. You won’t see them wearing pins for Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, or many other Americans killed by illegal aliens. They’re just ticked that the ICE agents rounding up the perpetrators are wearing masks. That’s because their real agenda is undermining immigration enforcement entirely.