It starts with a phone camera, a parked ICE vehicle, and a resident with a phone who’s clearly had enough. “We’re protecting U.S. citizens,” one masked federal agent declares. “I don’t want your protection. You’re Nazi skinheads,” the resident fires back.
Gregory Royal Pratt, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune with over 40,000 followers, posted the 38-second video, which has received over 150,000 views on X (formerly Twitter) as of the time of writing. The video shows a scene that is all too familiar: a resident recording a group of mask-wearing, uniformed federal agents sitting in a squad car with many cramped detainees in the back. The agents respond calmly and act as though nothing is wrong. Yet, they speak in a performative and dismissive way before driving off.
When the resident calls them “Nazis,” one agent asks,
“Why are we Nazis?”
As if the answer weren’t framed right behind him!
A confrontation between federal immigration agents and a resident:
“We’re protecting US citizens.”
“I don’t want your protection… You’re Nazi skinheads.”
“Why are we Nazis?” pic.twitter.com/oL8IWO9iHH— Gregory Royal Pratt (@royalpratt) October 16, 2025
The comment section under Pratt’s post became an impromptu town hall. “Why are you hiding your faces if you’re just protecting U.S. citizens?” wrote one, voicing what thousands were thinking. Another user went straight for the jugular: “Maybe because you go up to random U.S. citizens and scare them for no reason other than they look brown.” Others chimed in with rage that’s becoming commonplace whenever ICE goes viral. A third pointed out that the agents even ordered the passerby to “stay right here,” despite him being uninvolved. Yet another summarized the mood: “Yeah, you are at the very least racist authoritarian pieces of [expletive].”
Some drew historical parallels. “If it walks like a duck — or in this case, if it steps like a goose…” wrote one as they compared ICE’s masked operations to fascist policing. While this frustration isn’t new, it’s in one clip that encapsulates what ICE has been accused of spreading for years. According to NPR, what’s happening here might be legal, and that’s what makes it alarming!
Since the early 2000s, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had broad authority to stop, question, and even arrest people without a warrant if they have “reasonable suspicion” that someone is undocumented. The issue is that “reasonable suspicion” has (in many recent cases) looked a lot like racial profiling. Courts say that race, language, and location can’t justify a stop. But the Supreme Court paused that protection and recently gave ICE wider leeway yet again.
Add to that the masks. ICE claims the coverings are to protect agents from being doxed online, but civil rights advocates argue that it strips accountability from law enforcement. Federal policy needs agents to identify themselves “as soon as practical.” Yet videos like this one suggest that “practical” is becoming an elastic term. As Ahilan Arulanantham from UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law notes, this gray area leaves “lawyers and the public alike” confused about what’s actually lawful.
Meanwhile, people are being detained in parking lots, car washes, and apartment lobbies. And as this video shows, even bystanders trying to film are getting barked at. Whether you call it protection or profiling, masked white agents hauling brown detainees into unmarked cars feel less like public safety and more like a show of power. And it sure plays badly on camera.
And thanks to social media, the American public is no longer an audience. Every viral clip like this turns into a question about what kind of country the U.S. wants to be. When “protectors” look like people many fear, things get worse.
