Congress is set to approve a defense policy bill that bars unidentified federal law enforcement officers from policing protests. The bill responds to a phenomenon that Mother Jones flagged in June: Unidentified federal law enforcement officers with no identifying insignia joined in the Trump administrations coordinated crackdown on protests against police violence in several cities earlier this summer.
The 4,500-page annual defense policy bill that emerged from a House-Senate policy committee Thursday requires any armed forces personnel, including National Guard members, and federal law enforcement agents who respond to a civil disturbance, to display either their name or some other individual identifier, as well as the organization or branch of the Armed Forces for whom they work.
This provision is a direct response to the presence in multiple cities of unidentified federal officers last summer. I first reported on this issue on June 3 during a protest in Washington. Agents I approached would only say that they worked for the Department of Justice or the federal government. Other reporters elicited similar responses.
The Justice Department later acknowledged that the agents I talked to were from the Bureau of Prisonsfederal prison guards, in other words. The agents were from special riot control teams dispatched to DC along with many other federal agents as part of a show of force ordered up by Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr in response to one night of looting and vandalism in downtown DC amid largely peaceful mass protests that followed the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In July, the Trump administration deployed more unidentified agents as part of a large federal response to protests around a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon. In Portland agents in unmarked, rented minivans emerged and detained protesters without identifying themselves. Customs and Border Patrol later told Mother Jones that its agents had carried out the arrests in Portland.
The provision in the defense bill, which is drawn from a bill offered by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), would bar such conduct.
President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr deployed an army of unidentifiable federal officers in riot gear to crackdown on peaceful demonstrators exercising their constitutional rights across the country and treated American citizens like they were an enemy, Schumer said in a statement Thursday. The legislation Sen. Murphy and I worked to include in the NDAA puts an end to this abuse of power and ensures that federal law enforcement is transparent, identifiable, and accountable.
The measure in defense bill is not as strong as the language Murphy and Schumer introduced. It no longer mandates that the names of officers be displayed, instead allowing other identifiers like badge numbers. And it includes an exception for federal officers who dont normally wear uniforms or who are working undercover.
Murphy said in tweets Thursday night that these changes reflected normal compromises required to get a proposal into law. A Senate aide said the alternations responded to feedback from the federal law enforcement community.
Defense policy bills, unlike most legislation, pass every year. As a result they are routinely stuffed with policy reforms, both large and small, including many with limited links to defense. This years bill also includes legislation requiring shell companies in the US to report their ultimate owner to the Treasury Department, a step aimed at cracking down on money laundering.