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Leftists want to identify and harass or kill ICE agents. If my brother or dad worked for ICE I'd want him to cover his face.
The memes are dumb, I agree.
I simply no longer care if people get killed while impeding efforts to deport invaders. As @Armin states succinctly, immigration is a ratchet especially when you have a rabidly pro-immigration media. If people don't want to get shot, they can stay in their countries of origin or not get aggressive with federal law enforcement trying to work in a hostile area.
MAGA will lose the house because the average normie is clueless and because the persecution complex energizes leftist. But there was really no way to avoid that as the entire media complex has gone into overdrive spinning a narrative of persecution since 2016.
I am sympathetic, it is a human impulse. However, "criminals and leftists want kill police officers" is not a new phenomenon, but > century old. If you make it "leftists want to kill authority figures", that goes back to OG French revolution, which makes it older than modern policing (as attributed to SIr Robert Peele). Yet it used to be norm that a civilized people are policed by unmasked officers. the law enforcement needs sufficient methods to stop people who want kill them (and get them when they do), but it would be vastly preferable they used the normal policing methods to get that outcome. Find the perps, arrest them, preferably for conspiracy to kill law enforcement agents before they kill anyone, throw the book on them.
Hiding your face because you are afraid of the perps has very much South American failed state energy. Wannabe criminals should be scared shitless of the idea of killing a law enforcement agent, who can show his face like an upstanding citizen (which he probably is). One step getting in that direction is managing perceptions.
I am also sympathetic concerning use of weapons. Like, I don't find it ethically distasteful notion for the police use violence or shoot people who interfere with legitimate policing action. My problem is that the shoots that make the news from the US rarely appear intentional and purposeful. I recall was one of conclusions I made about Jan 6 debacle (after mulling it over) was that the shoot was "directionally correct" action but whole situation was suboptimal because shitty mission parameters: the law enforcement didn't come in sufficient numbers, initially employ insufficient force to establish a clear perimeter, and no surprise, they find them in situation where they are confused and perhaps panicked and have to shoot. I found it darkly ironic that the same description and complain matched quite well the Jan 7 shooting of Renee Good. (Uncertain if it matches this recent case)
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