The Trump administration has sued at least five states and the city of Philadelphia over laws that supporters say would hold law enforcement—including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—accountable for misconduct on the job. The specifics of the laws vary, but the Trump administration takes particular issue with the fact that the laws would prohibit ICE officers from wearing masks during immigration raids, and require them to wear some sort of individual identifier.
Having to show their faces, lawyers for the Trump administration argue, would put ICE officers in danger.
In complaints filed against New York, Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, attorneys for the federal government claim that people take photos of ICE officers to “run them through facial recognition applications that search social media and doxing sites,” specifically calling out an art project called ICESpy. (California was subject to a similar lawsuit months before the other states, but the DOJ did not mention ICESpy in that complaint.)
There's just one problem, according to ICESpy’s creator, artist Kyle McDonald: the art project's face-recognition software cannot recognize most, if any, ICE agents currently in the field.
ICESpy is based on photos, job titles, and names of people who self-identified as ICE nearly a decade ago on LinkedIn. WIRED viewed a version of the list, which had just over 700 entries, and found that the most common title was “assistant chief counsel,” and many of the people appeared to have executive, administrative, or legal roles. Only 39 people on it had “deportation officer” in their title, and an additional 27 had related titles such as “enforcement and removal assistant” or “immigration enforcement agent.”
Many deportation officers joined the agency well after the data was collected. In January, ICE announced that it had more than doubled its number of agents and officers in just a few months, from 10,000 to 22,000. None of those additional people would be in the database, unless they had another job with ICE in 2018 (and posted about it online).
“They make this claim that people are using this site and others to search for family members. They offer no evidence of this in the filing,” McDonald tells WIRED. “The idea that someone could use a site like ICESpy and find an active ICE deportation officer in 2026 is absurd.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Data issues aside, ICESpy is not popular. WIRED reviewed activity logs for ICESpy between June 30 and July 6, which showed there were only 84 page views that week—a remarkably small number, even for a niche art project website. Only two face-match attempts were made, and the results of both were so bad that McDonald says they could not possibly be a match of anyone in his dataset of 2018 LinkedIn users.
“Like, I'm sure people were playing with it at some point?? But it is not an active threat to ANYBODY Imao,” McDonald says in a text message.
Attorneys for the federal government also blame another site, ICE List, for aiding people interested in "doxing" ICE agents. ICE List describes itself as an accountability initiative, and keeps track of people involved with ICE and other agencies involved in deportation efforts, along with vehicles used on the job and incidents that occur during enforcement actions.
Individual agent pages on ICE List typically include the person’s name and general information about what their job title is, the field office they are associated with, and any incidents they might have been involved in along with links to public sources that corroborate the claims on the page. When WIRED analyzed the site in January, we found that it too relied mostly on data that self-described ICE employees had posted on LinkedIn. It also doesn't have any sort of public-facing way for visitors to try to computationally analyze photos, though some agent pages include headshots.
Dominick Skinner, ICE List’s maintainer, says the site has a small, dedicated group of people who try to use face recognition, but their success with the technology so far has been “overblown,” and the site mostly relies on manual research.
“I wish we had a tool good enough to take away the work 😂” Skinner tells WIRED via text message.
The group of ICE List users was recently credited for identifying David Brouillette, the ICE agent and former Army veteran who allegedly shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian living in Maine. In that case, the website put out a request for information from people in Bangor, Maine, and Skinner says two people close to Brouillette came forward. Brouillette’s ex-wife later told the Portland Press Herald that she had previously reported concerns about Brouillette’s mental health to his superiors in the US military. Brouillette did not respond to a request for comment.
Skinner says that ICE List doesn’t fit the traditional definition of doxing—it does not post agents’ home addresses or that of their family—and that data broker sites post far more intimate information about agents but don’t face the same level of scrutiny. Older guidance from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, advises people to request to remove their personal data from such sites.
It’s unclear how many ICE agents have actually been identified because of ICESpy or ICE List. The Department of Justice, which is litigating the cases, did not put specific numbers in its complaints.
DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels says that “individuals have used facial recognition and doxxing tools to identify and harass federal law enforcement officers, and these sites frequently change domains, shut down, and reappear under new names.”
Pels did not respond to WIRED’s request for a concrete example of a protester using ICESpy to identify an ICE agent.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers say their laws requiring ICE agents to identify themselves are trying to address very real issues around democracy and justice, and the federal government should prioritize other work that’s within its remit.
“Instead of challenging these reasonable restrictions, the Department of Justice should seek accountability for the actions of poorly trained ICE agents, release the Epstein files, and investigate the Trump organization’s unprecedented corruption,” says Virginia state senator Saddam Salim, where the federal government successfully won an injunction pausing SB 352, the state’s new law that prohibits law enforcement in the state from wearing masks, among other restrictions.
ICE officers weren’t wearing congressionally mandated body cameras when they fatally shot two people in Maine and Texas this month, making it more difficult to investigate what happened. Federal officials refused to produce evidence to Minnesota investigators related to the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti for nearly half a year until they were compelled by the courts. WIRED recently reported that ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal watchdog that investigates employee misconduct, is busy looking into civilians who post criticism online about the federal government and its immigration policies.
“States have a right and an ability to be able to react and respond to what we see as unconstitutional behavior by our federal government,” says Bob Duff, a Connecticut state senator who worked on a law for his state that is now being challenged. “And we have a right and responsibility to protect our own residents in the state.”
