The activist who exposes US immigration agents
An Irishman living in the Netherlands has revealed the identities of around 100 agents and collaborators so that they can be held legally accountable.
WashingtonBalaclavas, hubcaps, and sunglasses to conceal their faces have become the new uniform for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Often, this is the only way to identify them during operations, as they rarely wear any other form of identification or identification. The protection offered by anonymity is almost total for the officers of this agency, who are increasingly adopting more violent tactics and have become emissaries of the terror that Donald Trump wants to unleash against migrants. "These people need to understand that there will be accountability, that they will not act with impunity," argues Dominick Skinner, the Irish activist who has exposed a hundred agents using artificial intelligence. Skinner lives on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Netherlands, but his name has already been mentioned in the United States Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement against the their website, ICE List. It is on this website that Skinner and two other activists, with the help of some 200 volunteers, put faces, names, and surnames to immigration agents, as he explains in a phone conversation. Depending on the type of information they receive through the website, the identifications are easier or more difficult. If a full-face photo is unavailable, it is reconstructed using artificial intelligence, and then a data verification process is carried out, reviewing, among other things, social media.
The list identifies not only the agents themselves, but also their collaborators and high-ranking officials. The website can be filtered by state, and some profiles, despite containing names, lack photographs. "These are cases where the images we had obtained included third parties, and we didn't want to expose them," Skinner explains. Addresses are also not included.
"We used to make many Freedom of Information Act requests to get information about an arrest and, possibly, see who the arresting agent was. Now they no longer share the names of ICE agents, partly because they've seen what we do. Recently, the Trump administration has been pressuring tech companies to remove apps designed to alert users to the presence of ICE agents in order to avoid them."
Resistance Campaigns Against Trump
The project arose as one of many resistance campaigns against the terror offensive that Trump is deploying through immigration services. The feeling of insecurity has increased not only for undocumented immigrants, but for anyone who is not white. A recent Supreme Court ruling authorizes agents to conduct racially profiling arrests and a recent research by ProPublica It shows how up to 170 US citizens have been detained and mistreated by ICE.
"What ICE does has nothing to do with migrants. It's about skin color. Migrants aren't the only ones living in fear, but all those people who were simply born with a slightly darker skin tone than their neighbors," Skinner denounces. "This culture of fear is what Trump has instilled, and it's his responsibility. And when his term ends, if any country wants to take the Trump administration to court, I'll have more names to provide," explains the activist, who draws a parallel with the banal evil of Nazi officials who excused themselves under the guise of "This time, there are people pointing out who the Nazis are within the US," he concludes.
Beyond holding them accountable in the future, Skinner asserts that the other objective is to make the agents submit. According to the activist, if they want to go around with their faces covered, it's because deep down they know that what they're doing won't be well received by their neighbors. Skinner claims that since he started the project, two agents have contacted him saying they've quit. "In return, we remove them from the website," he says. The Department of Homeland Security has not confirmed these resignations.
Government Criticism
The Trump administration has labeled the project a public shaming campaign aimed at intimidation. Skinner defends himself by saying the website doesn't publish addresses: "If someone wanted to target an ICE agent, they wouldn't come to my website." He adds, "These people saying this are the same ones who have openly said that ICE should have artificial intelligence to track and identify Americans. It's quite hypocritical to want any American identified except for an ICE agent." In Congress, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced a bill this month to shut down Skinner's website. The senator says she wants to keep the identities of ICE agents secret for security reasons, so she wants to make it illegal to publish the name of a federal agent with the intent to obstruct their operations. In the spring, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened retaliation against any U.S. citizen who publishes the identity of an agent. Skinner says that this prompted him to start the project: "I said on the internet, 'Hey, Americans, I'm not in America, so send it to me and I'll make it public.'"
"I've been waiting for there to be legal repercussions against me, but I don't think it's happened yet because there's no legal circuit to pursue. We haven't broken any laws," the activist says. However, he believes this is the objective of the law being pushed by the Tennessee senator: "That's when I think they might move on to legal attacks."