Construction workers, electricians, couriers: How ICE agents use disguises to deceive and detain migrants

“Buenos días,” says a man wearing an orange vest with a logo resembling that of a government agency, speaking in Spanish. His partner is dressed the same way. “We’re working for the city, we’re working on the light pole,” the purported electrician told a resident in South Los Angeles, a predominantly Hispanic area. He said they needed him to move his vehicle so they could carry out the work. It was a trap set for José de Jesús Cortez Delgado. When the Mexican man moved his truck out of the backyard and parked it in an alley beside his house, several agents jumped out of unmarked vehicles, pointed guns at him and shouted, “Don’t move, hands up!” — as seen in a video.

It is a tactic that activists, politicians and immigrant-rights organizations have in recent months attributed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), accusing the agency of using ruses to carry out a mass deportation plan promoted by the administration of Donald Trump. According to these complaints, agents posed as utility workers in Oregon, construction workers in Connecticut and New York, and package couriers in Chicago. In another undercover operation, they allegedly even placed a Mexican flag on the hood of a vehicle to gain their targets’ trust.

But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) denies that ICE operatives are behind these kinds of actions. In the operation mounted to detain Cortez Delgado on June 20, federal marshals (the agency responsible for locating fugitives) were the ones who posed as municipal electrical workers, according to a statement sent to EL PAÍS.

“This was not an ICE arrest,” the agency emphasized regarding that detention in Los Angeles. “ICE officers do not disguise themselves or pose as utility workers; any assertion to the contrary is categorically false. When our officers carry out operations, they clearly identify themselves,” it added.

After his arrest, Cortez Delgado was transferred to ICE custody. The U.S. Marshals Service did not respond to a request for comment about the method used to detain this Mexican national. DHS maintains that the migrant was wanted because in December 2020 he was jailed in Nevada on a murder charge. It also says he had remained in the United States without authorization since October 1999, when his tourist visa expired.

Ron Gochez, a teacher in Los Angeles and activist with the group Unión del Barrio, offers a different account. He says Cortez Delgado’s wife told him those charges had been dropped and that her husband had no outstanding legal issues. This outlet could not corroborate that information, and the Mexican man’s wife declined to be interviewed for fear of reprisals.

Gochez arrived at the family’s home shortly after the woman called the organization to report what she believed was an ICE operation. “Their tactic is to demonize or attack people’s moral character so the public will think they are a murderer, so people on the street won’t try to protect the migrants who are detained,” Gochez said, alleging that ICE had deliberately concealed the migrant’s acquittal.

Since last summer, Unión del Barrio has been conducting what it calls community patrols in the streets of South Los Angeles in response to harsher ICE and Border Patrol operations. The organization relies on a network of volunteers who document and share videos, photographs and information about arrests on social media.

Gochez says they have also identified undercover agents who use pretexts to get their targets to leave their homes. “They told one person: Hey, is that your car? I think it’s being stolen,” he explains. “They also use a Mexican flag on their vehicles so people won’t know who they are.”

The activist also questions ICE’s claim that its agents do not disguise themselves and fully identify during operations. “The mere fact that they come out masked shows they do not identify themselves. We don’t know if they are from ICE, the DEA or the FBI. That creates fear and distrust in the community.”

‘What agency are you from?’

One of the main criticisms of ICE during Donald Trump’s first term (2017–2021) was that some of its agents posed as local police officers: they wore bulletproof vests with the word “police” and identified themselves as such when knocking on a home’s door.

Now the complaints have escalated. Activists and organizations say federal agents operate with covered faces, dress in plain clothes, travel in vehicles with tinted windows and, in some cases, pose as construction workers or utility employees to carry out arrests. According to a report in The Intercept, ICE itself acknowledged in 2025 that one of its officers wore a safety vest, a hard hat and dark glasses when approaching an activist in New York.

“What agency are you with?” Juan Fonseca Tapia, co-founder of Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants in Connecticut, asked while recording with his cellphone from inside his car. Through the window, the man replied: “I’m not going to tell you… It’s none of your business.” When Tapia pressed him, the man only said he belonged to the “federal law-enforcement forces.” In a statement cited by the outlet, ICE reportedly revealed that one of its own was behind the disguise: “ICE New York City officers were conducting surveillance in Brewster, New York, August 2, when anti-ICE agitators followed them and attempted to disrupt their operation.”

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on this and other incidents mentioned by organizations and media outlets. “This kind of misleading information contributes to our officers suffering an increase of more than 1,300% in assaults and more than 8,000% in death threats while they arrest the worst criminals,” it said in its statement.

The use of camouflage masks, the lack of visible identification and other ICE tactics have prompted legislative initiatives in California, Washington, Oregon, New Jersey, New York and other states. Los Angeles and Saint Paul counties in Minnesota have also adopted similar measures. Meanwhile, the VISIBLE Act remains pending in Congress, a proposal that would impose the same requirements at the federal level.

California was the first to pass a law of this kind, in September 2025, but the federal government challenged it in court. Last April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit temporarily stayed part of its implementation while the litigation is resolved. The Trump administration argues the measure is necessary to protect ICE, Border Patrol and other agency personnel, as well as their families, from possible reprisals.

In their efforts to detain people with irregular immigration status, federal officers have used other operational strategies. In one of the better-known cases, a group of Border Patrol agents in August 2025 arrived in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Los Angeles hidden in the back of a rental moving truck from a well-known moving company, as seen in a video released by the agency. The aim was to approach day laborers offering their services without being detected. The operation was called “Trojan Horse.”

‘They don’t even follow the law’

A woman carrying a cardboard box and a man enter the yard of a house in Chicago. He heads directly to one side of the house while she rings the bell and steps back a few paces, as if simulating a package delivery. She insists several times, but no one opens the door, according to surveillance video. In another incident, a man wearing a yellow vest with reflective tape was filmed detaining another person and loading him into the back of a pick-up truck. To date, it has not been confirmed which agency those operatives belong to. However, ICE is the main agency singled out in several of these undercover operations, an agency that has repeatedly faced accusations of lacking transparency.

A similar case occurred this January in Gresham, a suburb east of Portland, Oregon, where agents who knocked on several homes posed as utility company employees with the goal of getting migrants to come out of their houses, according to complaints. The three affected families reported what happened to state lawmaker Ricky Ruiz and told him it had been ICE. “They are doing everything they can to deceive people, lie to our community and then detain them,” Ruiz told KGW. “They don’t even follow the law.”

These incidents prompted such concern in the area that two local companies, Portland General Electric and Northwest Natural, issued statements that, without mentioning ICE, warned about people who were “using pressure tactics to get into homes.” Both companies stressed that their employees carry official identification and never ask to enter homes to perform their work.

For Los Angeles activist Ron Gochez, these actions — whether attributed to ICE or other law-enforcement agencies — reflect an evolution in arrest methods. “It is the result of the work of organizations that monitor and patrol the community,” he says. And he concludes: “They can’t detain people as easily as before.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition