Last week, a website called ICE List went viral after its creators said that they had received what they described as a leak of personal information about nearly 4,500 Department of Homeland Security employees. However, a WIRED analysis of the site found that the database relies heavily on information that apparent DHS employees have posted publicly online themselves. This comes at a time when DHS has characterized reporting on or publicizing the identity of ICE officers as “doxing” and has threatened to prosecute perceived offenders to the fullest extent of the law.
ICE List operates as a crowdsourced wiki maintained by volunteers, who have discretion over who is added and what is marked as “verified.” Like Wikipedia, with which it has no affiliation, ICE List has category pages that feature a link to every page included in that category. Not everyone on the list is an ICE employee or even affiliated with a federal agency; former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, for example, whom DHS told the Associated Press is not an ICE agent, is included in the wiki’s “Agents” category. On his actual page, his “Agency” is listed as “N/A” and his “Role” is listed as “Propagandist; Agitator.” (Tarrio posted on X that he wished he worked for ICE, but called the ICE List page disinformation.)
Dominick Skinner, the owner of ICE List, says he does not believe that what ICE List does is doxing. ICE List doesn’t post the home addresses of identified agents, and says on its About page that “false submissions, harassment, or attempts to misuse the platform will be removed.”
“If this were doxing, then we dox ourselves by simply being present in online environments,” Skinner says, “which is just rather ridiculous.”
WIRED reviewed individuals’ pages that were included in the “Agents” category on ICE List as of January 22. Of the 1,580 pages, nearly 90 percent mention LinkedIn as a source of information, though some of the links cited now appear to be broken, and not all of the links support claims made on the wiki. (Someone listed as “active” on ICE List may, for example, have a LinkedIn depicting them as a former legal advisor for ICE. On its About page, ICE List says that “errors may occur.”) Other linked profiles lack photos and don’t appear to be very active. Some of the links, however, appear to match federal immigration agents who have previously been named in official ICE press releases and court records.
Like other LinkedIn users, those who self-identify as ICE deportation officers and other types of DHS employees are in many cases posting New Year’s resolutions, reacting to meandering motivational posts about the meaning of leadership, and letting people know they’re #opentowork.
The DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Some individuals’ pages on the ICE List wiki cite OpenPayrolls, a searchable database of public employees’ salaries that includes some ICE employees, and SignalHire, a data broker that specializes in lead generation, as sources of information.
A spokesperson for OpenPayrolls wrote in an email that it has no affiliation with ICE List and that the ICE-related payroll records on its site were released by the US Office of Personnel Management in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The spokesperson also said, “To date, we have not received outreach from any government agency expressing concerns regarding the display of public records on our transparency website.”
SignalHire did not respond to a request for comment, but it also includes direct links to the LinkedIn profiles of people representing themselves as ICE officers on its website.
