The Battle to Unmask ICE Agents Online
ICEList has named over 100 agents. Blackburn wants to make that illegal. The clash highlights a deeper fight: secrecy versus accountability in U.S. immigration enforcement
Good morning! Marsha Blackburn is big mad at Dominick Skinner, an activist in the Netherlands unmasking and naming ICE agents on his website, ICEList.is. The senior senator running for governor in Tennessee didn’t mince words in her recent press release naming Skinner as the direct cause for her quixotic legislative push to felonize naming ICE agents online.
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The proposed “Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act” aims to make it a crime to publish the name of a federal officer with the “intent to obstruct a criminal investigation or immigration enforcement operation”.
In doing so, the Senator has shone a spotlight not on a threat to law enforcement, but on the very real struggle for accountability against an agency that operates in the shadows.
First, let’s address the central claim: “doxxing.” Blackburn alleges that Skinner’s project, icelist.is, uses facial recognition technology to “dox” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
However, her own press release concedes that the “ICE List does not publish addresses”. Doxxing, by definition, is the act of publishing private information like home addresses. Skinner’s project explicitly refrains from this, making the Senator’s accusation a convenient but inaccurate piece of political theater.
What the website does publish are the names of public officials who carry out their duties, often while wearing masks to conceal their identities. To equate this with doxxing is a gross misrepresentation of a legitimate act of public scrutiny.
Second, Blackburn argues icelist.is puts ICE agents at risk by citing a statistic that assaults on ICE agents have gone up hundreds of percent. How steep is the percent have assaults increased? The number varies widely across the administration from several hundred percent, to over a thousand.
It’s a bullshit statistic. DHS constantly claims assault on its immigration agents, but the charges rarely stick, if they’re brought at all. During the raid on Congressman Jerry Nadler’s office in June, agents repeatedly claimed that a 26 year-old staffer assaulted an agent (she didn’t), then repeatedly told her to “stop resisting!” (she wasn’t). Watch:
Just yesterday, the ICE agent who gunned down Silverio Villegas González in Chicago said the injuries he were “nothing major”, directly contradicting the claim DHS made last week the agent had been “severely injured” by the fleeing migrant.
In July, I asked former DHS messaging chief Luis Miranda if he believed the eye-popping numbers of assaults the administration was claiming agents were enduring on the job. Miranda didn’t buy it one bit (watch).
The point: DHS lies, especially about ICE, and especially with Secretary/Influencer Kristi Noem helming the agency with her Boyfriend/Operative Corey Lewandowski, who I’d love to interview if he’s up for it.
Meanwhile, the mission of icelist.is is not to endanger officers, but to promote transparency for an agency that operates “as if it were a secret police force”. The “How We Identify Agents” page on Skinner’s website details a meticulous, multi-layered verification process that relies on public tips, leaked documents, and a system of “visual identification, behavioral matching, database records, and independent corroboration.” Facial recognition is just “one piece of the puzzle”.
This is painstaking work dedicated to creating a public record of who is responsible for carrying out controversial enforcement actions. The goal is not a “witch hunt,” but “accountability” and “evidence”.
Skinner’s defense of his work cuts to the heart of the matter: “If ICE agents were proud of their work, they would not be so ashamed as to hide their faces”. For years, ICE has been criticized for operating with a “wall of secrecy,” an approach that has resulted in “illegal detentions, the people who have died in their custody, and the horrific conditions that countless others have been forced to endure”.
By introducing a bill to criminalize the publication of an agent’s name, Senator Blackburn is attempting to make that wall of secrecy permanent. She is advocating for the criminalization of transparency itself.
The Senator’s position is particularly hypocritical when she argues that facial recognition technology is a powerful tool for law enforcement but “poses unthinkable risks” in the “wrong hands”.
Skinner correctly points out that this double standard suggests she believes ICE agents are more important than the citizens they serve. In a free and open society, law enforcement officers must be accountable to the public. They cannot hide behind masks while carrying out acts of “cruelty” and “violence,” as Skinner describes.
Ultimately, the fight over icelist.is isn’t about technology or safety; it’s about whether an arm of the federal government should be allowed to operate without public scrutiny. Blackburn protecting isn’t trying to protect individuals from harassment. She wants to shielding an entire agency from accountability.
ICYMI, ICElist editor claps back at Blackburn —
Definitely worth a read or two…
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