The online activists trying to stop ICE from making arrests

The online activists trying to stop ICE from making arrests

Two decades ago, Sherman Austin decided the life of an internet activist was no longer worth the trouble. He’d landed in federal prison at 20 years old after investigators found instructions on how to make a bomb on a website he hosted. After a year behind bars, Austin retired his self-taught coding skills. He found work as a low-voltage electrician in Long Beach, trained in mixed martial arts and started a family.

Then President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign roiled the Los Angeles region. Austin thought of his high school-aged children and the prospect of masked, anonymous federal officers entering their school to make arrests. The community would need to be alerted if that happened, he thought, so undocumented people could escape and less vulnerable people might show up and protest.

After several late-night coding marathons, Austin launched StopICE.net, which invites people to report sightings of suspected federal officers and notifies users who sign up for alerts. The network now boasts over 470,000 subscribers nationwide. It is one of dozens of sites that have launched in recent months as both undocumented immigrants and many U.S. citizens grow alarmed at the scale of Trump’s deportation campaign and the aggressive tactics officers are using to detain people.

Government officials including Attorney General Pam Bondi contend the websites are endangering the lives of officers and their families and effectively mobilizing communities to attack officers at work. The Department of Homeland Security says Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are increasingly being assaulted on the job; at least 79 officers have allegedly been attacked since Trump took office, compared to 10 over the same period in 2024, according to agency figures.

On July 4, a group of men and women ambushed the Prairieland Immigration Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. An Alvarado police officer was shot in the neck. And on July 7, a man opened fire on the McAllen Border Patrol Facility in McAllen, Texas, injuring a police officer and two Border Patrol employees.

Bondi recently warned on Fox News that the Department of Justice was “looking at” a site similar to the one Austin runs and said its creator “better watch out.”

“That’s not a protected speech,” Bondi said. “That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country.”

But site creators like Austin say they have no plans to back down. They say the popularity of the trackers is yet more evidence of a growing discontent over Trump’s handling of immigration enforcement.

“My attitude is, come and bring it,” Austin said. “I’m not breaking the law. I don’t have my face covered like these officers when they’re going around abducting people. So if they want to try it, let’s run it back.”

Austin says his site now boasts 470,000 subscribers nationwide.

Some StopICE.net users submit cellphone images showing officers in parking lots while others report unmarked cars that simply seem suspicious — a sign of the escalating fear many communities are experiencing. Immigrant advocates have increasingly taken to calling ICE a “Gestapo,” after Nazi Germany’s notorious secret police force, and characterizing the arrests as “kidnappings.” ICE officers are granted broad authority to make arrests and by law do not have to provide their names.

“It very much bothers me, a lot of the comments referring to my people as the Gestapo or Nazis,” said Jeremy O’Hara, a 15-year ICE agent who serves as the ICE agency president for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. “We’re only enforcing the laws on the books. And these laws are not new.”

O’Hara acknowledges the optics of enforcement have been damaging. But he said images of masked agents stuffing arrestees into unmarked vehicles and leaving scenes in a hurry are not evidence of a law enforcement agency overstepping the law. Rather, he said, those actions are a consequence of the new digital reality. Officers are wearing masks out of fear of their identities becoming known and their families coming under attack, and the swift arrests are a new necessity to avoid conflicts with onlookers who are often alerted to ICE’s presence via social media.

Federal law offers the government narrow recourse to restrict the websites. Emily Tucker, executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, said there aren’t many statutory protections for law enforcement anonymity. She said that’s a vestige of the idea that, in a well-functioning society, “the police are there to enforce laws that have been enacted as an expression of the will of the people.”

“In that context, it’s important that the police are recognizable and known to the community because it’s the community they’re supposed to be accountable to,” she said. “What we have now is the federal government has essentially unleashed an anonymized, militarized police force on its own people, and people are doing the most basic things they can think of to try to take back some sense of agency and security.”

California, in many ways, has become ground zero in testing that premise. Thousands took to the streets and formed community brigades to report ICE sightings after immigration officers swept through car washes and Home Depot parking lots to pick up undocumented immigrants. While DHS characterized them as the “worst of the worst,” ICE data shows many of the people being arrested have no criminal record. A federal judge this month barred agents from racially profiling and ordered the Trump administration to allow detainees access to lawyers.

On Austin’s site, California is the state with the most registered users. While his site tracks officer movements, others attempt to identify the often-masked officers making immigration arrests. One online group, No Sleep for ICE, identifies hotels where agents are lodging and encourages members to leave negative online reviews for the hotels and show up in person to disrupt officers’ sleep with megaphones and chanting.

The scrutiny from the public isn’t new for ICE, O’Hara said, “but it’s taken on a new fury.”

“We get them in custody and we get them into the car and get out of there as quick as possible because people are filming and posting we’re here and people are starting to come out. So we move off scene quickly to avoid a problem,” O’Hara said. “I don’t like wearing masks. I don’t like the look of it, but I can’t argue with the reasoning that my people are using.”

Federal agents stand guard as vans leave an agricultural facility where authorities carried out an operation in Camarillo, California, on July 10. (Daniel Cole/Reuters)

Officers, O’Hara said, are trying to avoid an appearance on sites like ICE List, which seeks to identify federal officers using publicly available information and user tips. The site was launched this spring by Dominick Skinner, a man in the Netherlands, and has been taken down twice by web hosts. Skinner said he believes the hosts acted after being contacted by U.S. officials. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

Skinner’s own name recently appeared widely online after he was identified in a story published by Glenn Beck’s Blaze media. In the piece, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin promised to “prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law. These criminals are taking the side of vicious cartels and human traffickers. We won’t allow it in America.”

DHS has accused Skinner of posting home addresses of agents. A Post review of the site found no addresses linked to officer names, and Skinner said he hasn’t posted any. But his website does include names, photos and in some cases links to officers’ social media accounts. Still, Skinner rejects the idea that he is “doxing” officers.

“I don’t want to cause any danger for anyone who hasn’t caused danger to people,” he told The Post in a phone interview. “And I only want those people to face legal consequences. I think that the rule of law needs to be respected by everybody — by people following me, but also by the people that we’re recording.”

Skinner said the Blaze article had two consequences — more user traffic to the site, and several pats on the back from friends in Europe.

“Maybe a lot of people in America don’t realize how widespread the belief is that the Trump regime is a fascist regime,” Skinner said. “I just needed to do something. And this is what something I could do.”

Skinner said he was homeless as a Dublin teen when he was kicked out of his home after defending his sister from their father’s physical abuse. He slept at bus stations until discovering a soup kitchen where he learned a trade, found work and rented an apartment. He views the anti-immigration crackdown here as a precursor to far darker times, and he’s discovered that many Americans agree. Skinner said he’s published the names of over 200 officers and has received thousands of tips, including dozens from people who said they were family members of the officer in question.

He’s experimenting with AI software that can take images of the parts of an agent’s face not obscured by a mask and match it with publicly available photographs. Skinner is also discussing with Austin how to combine their data and create a timeline of documented ICE arrests and name the officers who were there.

ICE officers gather for a Jan. 27 briefing in Silver Spring, Maryland, before an enforcement operation. (Alex Brandon/AP)

Federal law makes it illegal to reveal personal information such as addresses and phone numbers of federal law enforcement officers if it’s done with intent to threaten, intimidate or incite a violent crime. Several smaller jurisdictions have gone a step further: Daniel’s Law in New Jersey, for instance, protects the addresses and phone numbers of judges, prosecutors and law enforcement, regardless of the publisher’s intent. In June, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) proposed legislation that would make it illegal to release of the name of a federal law enforcement officer “with the intent to obstruct a criminal investigation or immigration enforcement operation.”

Rival legislation introduced this month by Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) would require ICE agents to show their faces when making arrests and have clear identification displayed on their bodies.

That would have disastrous consequences for those officers’ ability to investigate crimes unrelated to immigration, O’Hara said. The same AI tools that could allow Skinner to connect faces to names could be used by drug cartels to suss out potential undercover Customs and Border Protection officers, for example.

“It could have a major detrimental effect on all sorts of investigations for state agencies, for local agencies, and for federal agencies,” O’Hara said.

O’Hara believes the online panic over ICE is already hampering police investigating other, unrelated crimes. He monitors the ICE tracking websites popular in his region and finds the accuracy wanting (O’Hara spoke to The Post on the condition that the region he works in not be disclosed, out of safety concerns).

“I don’t have that many agents, but apparently we are all over the city, everywhere you look,” O’Hara said. “What that tells me is you’ve got other legitimate law enforcement operations going on and people are out and screaming and yelling at people who are doing a narcotics raid or rescuing a child victim of sexual abuse.”

The tide of false reports is something Austin and a team of volunteers have been working to stem. They’ve deleted some dubious reports and tagged others as unconfirmed. Some posts, they know, are submitted by trolls attempting to muddy the waters. No one has posted any threats yet, Austin said, but if a user attempts to incite violence via his site, he plans to delete it.

It was another person’s post on a web-hosting site Austin ran that landed him in prison years ago. Austin was among the first people to be prosecuted under a law championed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) two decades ago that made it illegal to publish bombmaking instructions with the intent that a reader commit a violent crime. Austin said a minor shared information about making bombs. He didn’t take it down, and investigators later found materials consistent with those used to make a molotov cocktail in Austin’s bedroom.

Austin’s defense attorney advised him that the Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of 9/11, provided for terrorism sentencing enhancements in his case that could’ve led to a 20-year prison sentence. Rather than go to trial, Austin agreed to a plea deal and spent a year in federal prison in Arizona.

He believes the government will use a similar tack to take down his new site.

“They’re going to try to paint this picture that it’s disseminating the information with some type of criminal intent when it’s clearly not,” Austin said. “The stakes now are similar to 20 years ago, because after 9/11 they said they were going after the terrorists, but they went after everyone’s rights. It’s the same framework that’s being used now, but it’s more aggressive because they’re not trying to hide it.”