Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.
The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees.
The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to be the largest ever breach of DHS staff data. It appears to include names, work emails, telephone numbers, roles, and some resumé data, including previous jobs of federal immigration staff.
ICE List founder, Dominick Skinner, told the Daily Beast: “It is a sign that people aren’t happy within the U.S. government, clearly. The shooting [of Good] was the last straw for many people.”
According to Skinner, who leads the volunteer-run website, the dataset includes about 1,800 on-the-ground agents and 150 supervisors. Early analysis by the organization suggests that around 80 per cent of the staff identified remain employed by DHS.
An initital set of the names from the leak will be posted on Tuesday night, Skinner told the Daily Beast.
He said individual reports from the public have also “spiked” “a lot” since Good’s shooting. “I’ve had hotel staff sending post-it notes, bar staff sending DHS IDs, and loads of people saying their neighbour is an agent,” he said.
Prior to the leak, which Skinner said he received on Monday, ICE List had been in possession of details of around 2,000 federal immigration staff, including names it has chosen not to make public.
Roughly 800 of these, he said, are frontline agents or are permitted to deputise for them on the ground. The latest leak brings details of the total number of federal immigration staff in its possession to around 6,500.
Skinner said he plans to list “the majority” of names the project is able to verify, because “ICE and CBP are in clear need of reform, and I believe working for either is a bad move on a moral level.”
He added: “We will make exceptions on a case-by-case basis, the best examples of which will be those who work in childcare within the agency, and nurses. There will be more exceptions, but we will have a discussion once the team flags a position as something we need to think twice about.”
DHS has said it shields the identities of its staff and agents—who famously almost always wear masks—for their own safety. It has previously had similar projects hosted in America taken down—including the ICE tracker app, ICEBlock.
Skinner, who is Irish with American relatives, but lives in the Netherlands, where he hosts the database outside of U.S. jurisdiction, said: “We never began with the goal of creating a large database [and] first just promised to share agent names sent to us, as Kristi Noem threatened Americans would be arrested if they attempted to do so.
“That’s now turned into the most recent version of the database, our ICE List Wiki, where we are aiming to have a comprehensive record of incidents, where we hope to be able to record all agents on the scene, all vehicles present, the field office that sent out the agents, and any other relevant information to the incidents.”
It was reported on Monday that Jonathan Ross, who has worked for ICE since 2015 and served Border Patrol before that, had lied to his neighbours about what he did for a living. People reported that the 43-year-old had pretended at a 2020 neighborhood garage party that he was a botanist.
Skinner said that, since June, two federal immigration staff members identified by ICE List had reached out to say they had left their posts and had been removed from the site. “We would do the same for any who has quit and has not been identified at a raid,” he added.
He said his project was important because DHS refuses to hold its own agents accountable for violations of the law.
Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast that its “law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists,” but that “thanks to the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians, they are under constant threat from violent agitators.”
She added: “Publicizing their identities puts their lives and the lives of their families at serious risk.”
