States Want ICE Agents to Show Their Faces The Trump Administration Is Banning Them

The Trump administration has sued at least five counties and the city of Philadelphia over laws that supporters say will be enforced, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers – responsible for misconduct. The specifics of the law vary, but the Trump administration faces a major challenge because the law prohibits ICE officers from wearing masks during immigration enforcement, and requires them to wear identification.

Showing their faces, Trump administration lawyers argue, puts ICE officials at risk.

In complaints filed against New York, Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, state attorneys say that people take pictures of ICE officials to “use them to identify faces that search social media and places of abuse,” specifically calling for a project called art. ICESpy. (California had 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, photographer Kyle McDonald: the project’s facial recognition software can’t identify many, if any, ICE agents in the field.

ICESpy is based on the photos, job titles, and names of people identified as ICE nearly a decade ago on LinkedIn. WIRED took a look at the list, which contained just over 700 entries, and found that the most popular title was “chief executive officer,” and most people seemed to hold executive, administrative, or legal positions. Only 39 people had “deporter” in their title, and another 27 had similar titles such as “enforcer and removal agent” or “immigration agent.”

Many deportees joined the organization after the data collection. In January, ICE he announced that it had doubled the number of workers and officers in just a few months, from 10,000 to 22,000. None of these additional people will be in the database, unless they have another job with ICE in 2018 (and they wrote about it online).

“They say people are using this site and others to look for family members. They don’t provide evidence of that in writing,” McDonald tells WIRED. “The idea that someone could use a site like ICESpy and find an ICE employee in 2026 is absurd.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Data issues aside, ICESpy is not popular. WIRED reviewed ICESpy logs between June 30 and July 6, which showed that there were only 84 page views that week—a very low number, even for a niche project site. Only two face-to-face tests were conducted, and the results of both were so bad that McDonald says he can’t match anyone in his group of LinkedIn users for 2018.

“Like, I’m sure people played with it at one point? But it’s not dangerous for ANYONE, Imao,” McDonald said in a text message.

Prosecutors also accuse another site, the ICE List, of helping people interested in “doxing” ICE agents. The ICE List describes itself as an accountability system, and it maintains a record of people involved in ICE and other agencies involved in deportations, as well as the vehicles used in operations and activities that occur during enforcement.

Individual agent pages on the ICE List usually include the person’s name and information about their position, office contact, and any activities they may have had along with links to resources related to the information on the page. When WIRED analysis The site in January, we discovered, also relied on information self-reported ICE employees posted on LinkedIn. It also doesn’t have a public view option for visitors to try to browse photos, although some sponsor sites do have photos.