A new law that will prohibit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from concealing their faces with masks goes into effect Jan. 1, while a Trump administration lawsuit to stop it is pending.

California’s No Secret Police Act, SB 627, authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, takes effect Thursday, marking the nation’s first statewide ban on “extreme masking” by law enforcement, including federal immigration officers.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.