Reverse Palantir: Inside The Online War to Identify ICE Agents (Exclusive)
An Irish activist operating from the Netherlands is weaponizing the same technology ICE uses against Americans to expose thousands of federal agents—and Congress can’t stop him.
WASHINGTON — A week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good three times in her car on a snowy Minneapolis street, a Department of Homeland Security employee had seen enough.
The whistleblower gave Dominick Skinner, a 31-year-old Irish immigration activist living in the Netherlands, the personal information of roughly 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol personnel—2,000 frontline enforcement agents and 2,500 support staff. The leak, which Skinner received in mid-January, represents one of the largest breaches of federal law enforcement data in recent history.
“It is a sign that people aren’t happy within the U.S. government, clearly,” Skinner told me in an exclusive Q&A this week with Migrant Insider. “The shooting was the last straw for many people,” he added.
ICE List, which Skinner founded in June 2025 as mass deportation operations accelerated under the Trump administration’s second term, already had the names of 2,000 immigration enforcement personnel. The new leak more than tripled his database. The site uses facial recognition AI—trained on video footage of masked agents during raids—to unmask and identify federal officers, then cross-references the results with public databases and social media accounts.
Hours after Skinner announced plans to publish the new names, ICE List went dark.
The Russian Connection That Isn’t
A sophisticated distributed denial-of-service attack took the site offline for several days. The traffic appeared to route through Russian servers, but Skinner is skeptical about the actual source.
“I think the location of an attack out of Russia is simply related to cost,” he said. “Bot farms are very cheap, and a DDoS that lasts a few days will only realistically cost a couple of thousand dollars, but would be even cheaper and have less oversight should it be run out of a nation like Russia.”
Translation: Anyone with a few grand and an interest in keeping ICE agents anonymous could have bought this attack. Skinner believes domestic actors contracted the Russian proxies. “I do believe we may have struck a nerve with those within the U.S., but I don’t believe that same nerve has been struck by actors internationally,” he said.
The site is back online, hosted in the Netherlands with an Icelandic top-level domain (.is) to evade U.S. jurisdiction. Skinner and a small team—assisted by more than 500 volunteers across America—continue adding names daily. Hotel staff send guest lists. Baristas photograph names written on ICE agents’ coffee cups. Community members blow whistles and honk horns when unmarked government vehicles roll through their neighborhoods.
Surveillance Turned Inside Out
There’s a bitter irony in using facial recognition technology—the same tools ICE deploys through Palantir, Clearview AI, and other contractors to track migrants—against the agents themselves.
“We never thought of the irony of it at all tbh, but in hindsight it’s fairly obvious,” Skinner said. “The idea of using it, is simply that it’s another tool in our arsenal, and that’s that really.”
He doesn’t operate the AI directly. A partner organization runs the facial recognition software, and they have a data-sharing agreement. The process works like this: Skinner’s team pulls screenshots from ICE raid videos showing masked agents.
The AI generates approximations of what the officers look like unmasked. Volunteers then run these images through reverse image search engines like PimEyes, which scrapes billions of photos from across the internet, often turning up LinkedIn profiles, Instagram accounts, and other public records.
When asked about Palantir’s role in building surveillance infrastructure for ICE—the company received a $30 million contract for “ImmigrationOS,” a platform providing “near real-time visibility” of migrants in the country—Skinner deflected. “I would note that the AI used by the regime is not just used against migrants, but also against U.S. citizens,” he said. “I think it would be worth reaching out to Palintir on their ethics regarding the software they’re building for the state.”
The Legal Gauntlet
Congress has noticed. The Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, introduced by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) in June 2025, would make it a federal crime to publish the name of a federal officer with intent to obstruct an investigation or immigration operation. Penalty: five years in prison and fines.
The bill is a direct response to Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s office publishing the names of ICE agents during a raid—and to sites like ICE List. Unsurprisingly, Blackburn is none too happy with Skinner, but what can she do?
Operating from the Netherlands gives Skinner a lot of breathing room. “We have been advised that our collection of Data is well within our rights under GDPR regulations, which provide specific protections for data collection deemed to be within the public interest, and for archival evidence, both of which we feel are fulfilled by our activities.”
He believes U.S. authorities have already explored legal cooperation with European counterparts to shut him down. “We’re now doing this for over half a year and have not felt any local pushback, and I don’t believe it will follow any time soon,” he said. If pressure intensifies, Skinner has a backup plan: “If I become a target of some sort of legal pushback, I will simply hand our data over to a colleague with no public visibility.”
Accountability Delayed, Not Denied
Skinner’s vision extends beyond immediate community defense, though he sees the list serving that purpose now—as a “public boycott portal” where communities can identify and refuse service to ICE personnel. His long game is international accountability.
“I would LOVE for this to end up in legal accountability for the agents involved, and that is our long term goal,” he said. “But let’s be realistic, that isn’t possible stateside until at least 2028, as I truly believe the regime would interfere in any attempt to bring accountability while they remain in charge.”
He’s banking on international action: “I believe our best hope of accountability may come internationally, with travel bans and international actions under the UN treaties that the U.S. are signatory to. Ultimately, I want this data to be handed over to lawmakers in 2028.”
Until then, the names keep coming. Good’s death on January 7—the ninth time ICE agents had opened fire on people since September 2025, killing four—broke something inside DHS. Someone with access decided documentation mattered more than a paycheck.
The surveillance state is eating itself. And from a basement office in Amsterdam, an Irish activist with a laptop and a partner’s facial recognition software is taking notes.
