Unknown until now, the name of Dominick Skinner, an Irishman living in the Netherlands, has been mentioned in the United States Congress. A senator cited him in support of a bill she introduced this month that aims to shut down Skinner’s project: a list of the first and last names of 100 immigration agents responsible for the detention of thousands of migrants across the country.
Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn wants the identities of federal officials carrying out President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign to remain secret for security reasons. To that end, she introduced the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, which would make it illegal to publish the name of a federal law enforcement officer with the intent to obstruct a criminal investigation or immigration operation. Skinner, for his part, has proposed the opposite: to publish as many names of the officers and their collaborators as possible.
To this end, I have created the “ICE List”, a website that lists the names and photos of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whose identities I have supposedly discovered. The website features photos compiled with the officers’ first and last names, along with information such as their LinkedIn or Facebook profiles and the method by which they were identified. Some appear masked. The search can be filtered by state and by their position. The majority are ICE agents, but the names and photos of immigration judges, Border Patrol agents, officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and other actors involved in Trump’s anti-immigration crusade also appear.
“I want to publicly shame them into resignation, because they don’t wear masks for safety. They wear them because they know their neighbors won’t invite them to dinner anymore, that their children or their children’s friends’ parents won’t want them at a baseball game. They care about their personal lives, but not about their safety,” Skinner said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands, where he lives.
Agent safety, however, is the argument Blackburn uses to call for a ban on the publication. “According to Mr. Skinner, if 35% or more of a face is visible, his technology can reveal individuals’ masked faces. Although ICE List does not publish addresses, Skinner has confirmed that a person’s name is sufficient to find personal information about them online,” the senator said in a letter to legislators.
Skinner uses artificial intelligence to identify agents in photos sent by collaborators. With AI, he obtains an approximate image based on small, uncovered portions of the face, and then searches social media for accounts with similar characteristics. Finally, he verifies that the identified person works for ICE or another federal agency and posts the information on his website. ICE List is managed by three people, but hundreds of volunteers have contributed around 400 profiles. Their website claims that all IDs have been verified. The list began in June and has already compiled the identities of around 100 ICE agents. In the last 30 days, it has received nearly a million views.
