Editor’s Note: The featured photo is of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies in riot gear arresting a woman was during the June 2025 ICE enforcement related riots. The woman was taken into custody for assaulting law enforcement horses. The video of her arrest went viral on social media. Photo: Daily News
In yet another performative flex from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Tuesday’s vote to advance an ordinance banning on-duty law enforcement, including federal agents, from covering their faces or concealing their identities in unincorporated Los Angeles County is already raising eyebrows, legal alarms, and accusations of political grandstanding.
The proposal, co-sponsored by Supervisors Janice Hahn and Lindsey P. Horvath, would require any officer interacting with the public to display a visible badge and agency identifier. The pitch to the public is simple: residents have reported encounters with masked, unmarked agents, often during immigration-related operations, prompting fears that some of these individuals could be impersonators engaged in kidnappings or other criminal activity.
But there’s one fundamental problem, the Constitution.
Legal experts across the board say the measure is on a collision course with the Supremacy Clause, the doctrine that federal law trumps any state or local legislation attempting to override or restrict it. In plain terms: Los Angeles County cannot force federal agents to comply with a mask ban, whether they’re ICE, FBI, Homeland Security, or any other federal branch operating within county borders.
Even county counsel all but admitted the obvious, acknowledging during the meeting that the ordinance “would most likely be challenged on the supremacy clause.”
Translation: this law doesn’t – and can’t – apply to the very agencies it claims to rein in.
So why pursue it?
To many critics, the answer is as transparent as the badge requirement itself: politics, not public safety. Passing a law that cannot be enforced against federal agents allows county leaders to package themselves as defenders of immigrant communities without confronting the legal limitations that make the ordinance little more than symbolic signaling.
By painting federal agents as “shadowy figures” and then publicly “standing up” to them, the Board has created a narrative designed to resonate with the Democratic base and immigrant-advocacy groups, even though the county has no actual authority to change how federal agents conduct operations.
The move also edges uncomfortably close to obstruction, some warn. While the county cannot legally force federal agents to remove masks or alter tactical protocols, attempts to pressure or interfere with federal operations could spark the same kind of legal battles already underway over California’s recently passed No Secret Police Act (SB 627).
Whether the ordinance survives or is ultimately gutted in court, one thing is clear: this fight isn’t about masks. It’s about jurisdiction, control, and political optics — a county government posturing as a counterweight to federal authority while knowing full well that the Supremacy Clause will have the final say.
And until someone in the Hall of Administration admits the obvious, expect more smoke, more mirrors, and more ordinances that look good in a press release, but collapse the moment they hit constitutional reality.
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