SCOOP: ICE List Shares Evidence With Letitia James
European Digital Activists, Stateside Oversight, and the Battle to Unmask Federal Power
WASHINGTON — “They want to criminalize transparency.”
Dominick Skinner, the Irish-born, Amsterdam-based creator of the ICE List, is no stranger to being cast as a political provocateur. But lately, the target on his back has grown larger—and the stakes much higher—with his activist engine at the center of a fast-evolving campaign to expose abuses by U.S. federal immigration agents.
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This week, Skinner confirmed what had long been rumored: ICE List volunteers have begun to share photographic evidence and videos directly with New York Attorney General Letitia James via a newly-created state portal—with similar flows of crowd-sourced tips streaming to Chicago’s dedicated email for documenting license plate tampering and officer misuse.
The move marks a turning point not just for the crowdsourced watchdog group, but for the new machinery of government accountability as state officials and Congress scramble to respond to mounting reports of abuse, misconduct, and mistaken detentions by federal agents.
PABLO: Will you be participating in any of the newly forming governmental ICE trackers?
DOMINICK: Well, currently, NY attorney general has released a portal to share ice photos and videos. Chicago have an email to collect abuses related to license plate tampering and misuse. I have already tasked some volunteers with allocating data to be sent to each, and we’ve already added the internal step of passing relevant information onto them immediately.
PABLO: So follow up question: Are you confident Letitia James will gather the evidence and move to hold offending agents accountable?
DOMINICK: No. And not through any fault of her own. I think the regime will attempt to subvert any attempt to hold them accountable. I run under the impression that the USA is now a dictatorship, and they will simply push back on any attempts. However, I want this to work. If this becomes an easier route to actually hold them to account, it’s literally a dream come true.
PABLO: Or another way to put it is ... you’re sending her your work, what do you hope she does with it?
DOMINICK: I hope she takes them through the dirt. I hope she serves them the justice they have coming to them. I just fear there’s an orange blob of injustice ready to smear her work.
From Amsterdam to Albany: Outpacing U.S. Jurisdiction
For Skinner, exile in Europe is both shield and sword. “Yes, rather humorously, the legislation being pushed cannot affect me without a U.S. invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, not to give them ideas,” he quipped in an earlier conversation. The ICE List’s operations—now powered by 200-plus volunteers, mostly American—are orchestrated overseas, out of reach from the very regime they scrutinize.
Yet Skinner’s motivation runs deeper than legal immunity. “If the USA falls to authoritarianism, especially of the fascist variety, it’s a danger to the planet. We’re already seeing copycat crackdowns here in Europe. I felt the need to do something—and this I could do.” As a survivor of homelessness in Ireland, Skinner’s personal journey is inseparable from his mission: “We survived because the world accepted us as migrants. I believe in frictionless borders, equal economic opportunity, and that in a fair world migration wouldn’t even be an issue.”
The ICE List, he explains, operates on a model of “distributed visibility”: grassroots documentation, real-time uploads, careful curation—followed, now, by submission to official oversight channels as they appear.
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A Digital Sledgehammer Targets the Immigration Enforcement Black Box
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, announced this week the formation of a “master ICE Tracker,” a federal digital ledger to expose what he calls “unconstitutional detentions and civil-rights violations.” The tracker is designed as a searchable database for verified reports from the public, lawyers, and field offices—an infrastructure to keep “receipts” on federal misconduct.
But resistance is fierce. Republicans, led by Oversight Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), have vowed to block any official “ICE tracker dot gov” website, with the possibility of intervention from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Instead of bipartisan effort, the House is riven by sharp disagreement over whether naming and tracking agents equals endangerment—a talking point Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has taken national in her gubernatorial campaign.
Skinner’s ICE List sits in the crosshairs. Blackburn recently named Skinner directly in a Senate press release, blaming him for the “Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act” (SB 1952), which would criminalize publishing agents’ names. But the ICE List doesn’t reveal home addresses or private details—only the faces and names of those who participate in raids, arguing that public enforcement demands public accountability.
“The fact that a sitting Senator has taken the time to try to turn me into the villain of this story only proves the point,” Skinner wrote in a fiery response. “They want to criminalize transparency.”
Digital Banishment: Apple’s ICE Shield
The digital feud goes far beyond Congress. Apple, yielding to law enforcement complaints, quietly removed DeICER—a civic evidence app logging ICE activity—from its App Store, invoking anti-hate-speech guidelines normally reserved to protect minority groups. Internal correspondence cited the app’s alleged potential for “harm” to federal officers by providing location information, effectively carving out a new protected class for agents inside Apple’s ecosystem.
DeICER’s designer, Rafael Concepcion, a former Syracuse journalism professor, insists the app was built for rights education and civil engagement, not surveillance or harassment. “Recording public officials is not harassment. It is democracy.” With 30,000 users before takedown, DeICER was minimalist and privacy-focused, refusing to store persistent personal data and auto-expiring all map pins.
Apple’s crackdown echoes a wave of digital platform shielding seen at Google and other tech giants. Efforts to build public ICE accountability tools are routinely suppressed, leaving activists scrambling to find alternative hosting abroad.
Concepcion hasn’t quit: He’s now offering his “Windbreaker” platform infrastructure to Congress for the federal tracker, proposing GPS and metadata validation, privacy-first architecture, and cross-state partnerships. “This isn’t software waiting to be funded. It’s a shared infrastructure waiting to be adopted,” he told Migrant Insider.
Accountability: Dream, Dread, or Dead-End?
Despite the headwinds, Skinner’s volunteers continue uploading and documenting, hopeful that James, Garcia, and others will act. When asked about the prospect of real accountability, Skinner is both resolute and skeptical.
“No. And not through any fault of her own. I think the regime will attempt to subvert any attempt to hold them accountable. I run under the impression that the USA is now a dictatorship, and they will simply push back on any attempts. However, I want this to work. If this becomes an easier route to actually hold them to account, it’s literally a dream come true.”
With ICE’s favorability at historic lows—recent Pew polling has the agency nearly as unpopular as the IRS—public pressure mounts. Congressional Democrats and state prosecutors, armed with new digital “ledgers” instead of symbolic forms, hold the chance to bring sunlight to what Skinner calls the “black box of federal immigration enforcement.”
Whether ICE List’s digital evidence shares will shake the regime’s wall of secrecy, or simply provoke new countermeasures, remains to be seen. For Skinner, though, the recipe for change is simple: “Generosity is what I believe can change the world.”
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