GoKawiilThe Trump administration continues to claim in lawsuits that ICE monitoring sites are doxing agents, without showing evidence that’s happening.
Most recently, the Department of Justice pointed to sites like ICEList.info and ICESpy.org in lawsuits it filed in an attempt to force four states to reverse policies blocking ICE agents from registering undercover license plates.
The DOJ alleged that the states’ policies are unconstitutional, unlawfully requiring federal officers to abide by different rules than state officers who can easily obtain undercover plates. Among risks to ICE agents denied undercover plates, the DOJ counted alleged threats of increased harassment and invasive tracking of officers, as well as the possibility that targets of ICE enforcement may more easily evade arrest.
In all the complaints, the DOJ claimed that confidential registrations also protect officers by making sure that no one can submit a public records request to access vehicle registration information. That is supposedly crucial since protesters and ICE watchers across the US keep photographing and filming ICE activity and posting that content online. Blocking license plate lookups would thwart additional risks of doxing, the DOJ claimed.
But the only support for claims of increased doxing that the DOJ provided was naming two ICE monitoring websites that prohibit doxing, and advocates have argued the websites are protected under the First Amendment.
ICESpy.org uses facial recognition to compare uploaded photos of ICE agents to public LinkedIn profile photos, only ever linking users to content that ICE agents themselves post online. The website explicitly warns that “threatening federal employees is a felony” and explains that it can’t be used to harass ICE employees, since “there is no additional useful information beyond what is self-reported on LinkedIn.”