An SF Journalist Took Photos of ICE Officers. Then He Was Asked to Blur Their Faces

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested four people outside the immigration court in downtown San Francisco this week, reporter Tomoki Chien was there to take cellphone photos and videos of the officers, some of whom wore sunglasses and masks that concealed their faces.

Chien, whose story for the San Francisco Standard published with those images, said he was surprised when he received a request from ICE to blur the officers’ faces after the fact.

“The interaction was not confrontational,” he said. “There was no confrontation or sense of hostility between us during that exchange.”

After the story was published, ICE spokesperson Richard Beam reached out to ask about blurring the faces.

“I fully respect the media’s right to take and use photos taken in a public space and would normally not make such a request,” Beam wrote in the email to Chien. “However, out of a concern for the safety of our personnel I wanted to simply ask.”

The Standard’s managing editor, Jeff Bercovici, said he quickly realized that ICE would need a much stronger case for him and his colleagues to grant the request to alter the images — and that doing so would set a dangerous precedent.

“That’s the kind of thing that anybody who works in law enforcement, anybody who works in government, any powerful person in the tech industry could say,” Bercovici said. “If we were to consider every time someone makes a plea like that, we would basically not run pictures of people with power or people who are involved with controversial government policy.”

To his knowledge, ICE is the only law enforcement agency that has made such a request of the Standard. It’s unclear how often ICE makes these requests to media outlets, but Beam told KQED that the agency “routinely” does so.

David Loy, the legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said that while government officials can always ask, there is no law barring media outlets from publishing photos or other identifying information of officers conducting operations in public — such as on the street in front of immigration court.

“If it’s just a polite request, the government has the right to ask,” Loy said. “What the government should never do is make it the least bit coercive or threatening, in substance if not in form.”

According to emails between ICE and the Standard reviewed by KQED, there was no evidence of coercion or threats.

The same cannot be said for the Federal Communications Commission’s announcement that it would investigate KCBS after the San Francisco radio station published details about an ICE operation in February — something Loy described as having a chilling effect on coverage of immigration enforcement.

“They claim they’re ‘investigating’ to leave this threat dangling over the station’s head, and that’s very pernicious,” Loy said. “It’s a direct attack on freedom of speech.”

Uniformed law enforcement officers in California are required to wear some form of identification, such as a badge or name plate. But that does not extend to federal agents, and ICE officers frequently conduct operations in plainclothes without any identification. During the arrests covered by Chien in the Standard, all the officers were in plainclothes and only one wore an ICE badge.

Journalistic ethics codes also generally oppose any alterations to photos or videos. But as the Standard reported in its follow-up story, other outlets such as NBC Bay Area and KTVU intermittently blurred the faces of ICE agents in television segments this week.

“We as journalists should not slide into a new norm of helping these agencies create a zone of unaccountability around their actions,” Bercovici said.

Bercovici also said that ICE, as a public agency, should make its case publicly if it plans to regularly ask news outlets to keep officers anonymous.

“If we can be convinced that there is a very specific threat, then we will consider that and might make a different decision,” Bercovici said. “But we think this is the right one for now.”