It took nearly a week before police in Ferguson, Missouri, got around to releasing the name of the officer who killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The stalling was blamed on concerns over officer safety, but in the eyes of the people who took to the streets to protest the latest police killing of an unarmed person of color, the delay suggested that people in uniform were subject to a different system of justice than the citizens they police. Would there be any hesitance to identify the shooter if the man shot dead were a cop? By the time Darren Wilson's name did come out, even Gov. Jay Nixon was calling the information “long-overdue.”

In the absence of more traditional forms of justice—such as trials for credibly accused cops—“transparency” has become the new best practice for police who find themselves under fire for taking a life, with the federal government acting as enforcer. After officers in Ferguson were caught covering their name plates during protests, for instance, Christy E. Lopez of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division fired off a letter to Police Chief Thomas Jackson. Anonymity “contributes to mistrust,” Lopez wrote. “The failure to wear name plates conveys a message to community members that, through anonymity, officers may seek to act with impunity.”

For all its talk of good policing in Ferguson, though, the federal government sets an awfully bad example at the top. Anonymity is standard operating procedure for the nation’s largest law enforcement agency: Customs and Border Protection (CBP), whose 45,000 agents and officers have killed at least 46 people since 2005, including more than a dozen Americans. Almost all the victims were people of color, most were unarmed, and seven of those killed were 18 years old or younger.

Not once has a CBP agent or officer been indicted, much less convicted of a crime, for their involvement in one of these incidents, according to CBP spokesman Carlos Lazo. Indeed, the agency's internal affairs division “is unaware of any CBP employee being disciplined in these cases”—not even internally—though “approximately half the cases remain open,” he said. And according to The Arizona Republic, officer and agent names have been made public in only 16 of the 46 incidents—and only then because they were released by a court or local police. Lazo told me that “consistent with other federal law enforcement practices,”the agency does not “disclose names of federal agents of officers who are the subject of investigations.” This is “due to their unique position as federal law enforcement officers who confront the most dangerous elements of society and may be targeted by those elements as a result of association with the allegation.”

There are no doubt some dangerous elements at the border—drug smugglers, "coyotes"—but this policy of never disclosing a name affects the families of people like José Antonio Elena Rodriguez. On October 10, 2012, the 16-year-old boy had just finished playing basketball with some friends in a park in Nogales, Mexico, and was walking home when an agent on the Arizona side of the border fired 14 hollow-point bullets through a fence. At least 10 of those bullets hit Rodriguez in the head and back, killing him on a main street in Nogales that happens to run along the border. He was unarmed, and died four blocks from his grandmother’s house.