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.