Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified maia arson crimew as a Swiss hacker. She is a journalist. I apologize. — Pablo
WASHINGTON — For two years the government told Americans they had no right to know who was knocking on the door. On Wednesday the door swung the other way.
Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. non-profit that specializes in publishing, archiving and analyzing leaked and hacked datasets, put the files out. The set covers more than 41,000 Homeland Security employees and contractors. Names. Titles. Work emails. Phone numbers. Office locations. Who answers to whom. Which internal groups they belong to. The archive is called Icepick.
This is the agency that sent men in balaclavas into Home Depot parking lots. Unmarked cars. No name tags. No badge numbers offered. Families watched their neighbors disappear and could not say who took them. Now a good share of the department behind those raids has a name. And a phone number.
The hackers explained themselves in one line. DHS employees “have our information, so it’s only fair that we have theirs,” they wrote.
What’s in the files
Customs and Border Protection accounts for 21,329 of the records, according to an early count by Unicorn Riot. ICE has 6,598. Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE, has another 3,421. Citizenship and Immigration Services has 6,245.
The group memberships are the story. A phone book tells you who works there. These files tell you who works with what. Reporters found groups referencing PenLink, Palantir’s FALCON platform and Mobile Fortify, the facial recognition app agents point at people on the street. Some groups carry labels like Undercover Operations and Covert Operations, Straight Arrow News reported.
A group membership is not a confession. It does not prove anyone used a tool on anyone. Some records are old. Some belong to contractors. Reuters matched six employees to outside records and phoned three more to confirm details. One told Reuters it was the first they had heard of a breach.
His own department hadn’t told him.
Blame Game
A group calling itself the Department of Peace claims credit. It says it harvested the data from the Okta sign-on service DHS uses. Okta says it has no evidence its own data or systems were compromised. Those are two different statements. Nobody has explained the first one.
The hackers said they were answering DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s promise of stepped-up ICE operations, CyberScoop reported. The same group claimed a hack of DHS contract documents in March. Nobody has said whether it’s the same door.
Swiss journalist maia arson crimew helped process the data. She says she did not obtain it. Washington knows her name. A Seattle grand jury indicted her in 2021 on computer intrusion and identity theft charges, the Justice Department announced. It did not matter. Swiss law bars extraditing a citizen without consent. She lives in Lucerne. She is not coming.
Global Fallout
DHS said it was aware of a potential breach and working to protect its people. It offered no timeline, no count and no explanation.
Then it called a contractor. ZeroFox, which landed an ICE contract in July worth roughly $13 million so far, fired off takedown demands. The notices warned of harassment, stalking and physical harm.
The registrar put the original domain, icepi.cx, on hold. The Icelandic host, FlokiNET, refused to pull the data and called it accountability reporting. The site came back under a new address. DDoSecrets posted a version anyone can run on a laptop.
Bluesky blocked links to the archive and slapped a “malicious” warning on them. DDoSecrets said work emails and office phones are not home addresses. Bluesky has not said whether the government asked. Silicon Valley has done this before. Meta blocked links to ICE List across Facebook, Instagram and Threads in January.
The reporting has already started. Reason published Thursday on ICE and HSI liaisons embedded with U.S. military commands, built from the leaked groups.
Europe steps up
This did not start Wednesday. It started in Amsterdam.
Dominick Skinner is an Irishman. He founded ICE List in June 2025, as mass deportations accelerated, and had logged 2,000 enforcement personnel before an earlier leak more than tripled his database. Migrant Insider profiled him in September 2025. In November 2025 his volunteers launched a searchable wiki tying agents to raids and vehicles, as we reported. They have also sent photos and video straight to New York Attorney General Letitia James through a state portal, Migrant Insider revealed.
This week ICE List said it is reviewing the Icepick records. It says it will add enforcement personnel only after confirming them.
So here is the map. A Swiss journalist in Lucerne. An Irish volunteer in Amsterdam. An Icelandic host that said no. Europeans are doing the accountability work the U.S. government refuses to do.
America does not do secret police
The secrecy was policy. ICE chief Todd Lyons defended the masks, saying if they kept officers and their families safe, he would allow it, the Guardian reported. Sen. Marsha Blackburn went further. She named Skinner in a press release pushing a bill to criminalize publishing agents’ names. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., said masked agents hiding their IDs “echoes the tactics of secret police authoritarian regimes” and called it out.
The public agrees. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,062 adults from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4 and found ICE the least favorably viewed of 12 federal agencies. Fifty-six percent view it unfavorably. Thirty-five percent view it favorably. A year ago, the split was 49 to 40, Pew found.
This isn’t new. ICE also ranked dead last in Pew’s 2018 survey, during Trump’s first term. Americans have never liked men with no names.
Louis Brandeis wrote it in 1913. “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
DHS paid a contractor to turn off the light. The site came back under a new name. The masks are still on in the street.
They are off everywhere else.
Dig Deeper
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God Bless the Europeans! 💪
I am so glad to see this. I do not want my friends and neighbors taken away!