It’s my pleasure to post information about this accountability project as a public service. There are many ways to contribute to this noble initiative. Spreading the word is one of them. Check out the website to find out about more.
The ICE List is an open journalistic project, created by Crust News, aimed at collecting and sharing information that can hold ICE members legally accountable. Here’s a 13 January 2026 article from The Daily Beast about the latest leak. (Thank God for whistleblowers.)
This section on how the project identifies ICE agents is worth quoting in its entirety:
We don’t rely on rumors. We verify everything. When it comes to identifying ICE agents, we treat every single piece of information like it could be used in court. Because one day, it might be, and if we have our way, it will.
Everything starts with an email, message, or mention. Sometimes it’s a message from someone on the ground. Sometimes it’s a short video posted online. Tips come in through our public submission form. We collect footage. License plates. Faces. Names. Unit patches. Every detail helps, but no detail is published without cross-checking.
No single clue ever stands alone. We begin by logging every tip into our internal system, tagging location, time, and content type. Then, we move to verification.
We aren’t doing this alone. Some of our best information has come from individuals acting on their own. Lone wolves, concerned citizens, people who have nothing to do with us but still send in crucial footage or photos. We don’t ask who they are, we don’t need to, we just need to verify what they send our way.
Then there are the leakers, brave individuals within the system who risk everything to expose it. We protect their identities at all costs, and we cross-check their leads like we would any other source. We thank them for the risks they are willing to take for the project we’ve taken on, and without them, we wouldn’t be making the progress we have made so far.
We also collaborate with several partner organizations, StopICE.net, ICE Spy, and other who would rather us not reveal the cooperation at this point. Their work and data are invaluable.
An AI research team works with us, too. They’ve developed tools that identify agents who haven’t covered their faces or changed gear. They help spot patterns in behavior, movement, and appearance that humans might miss. Their work is technical, but the results speak for themselves.
We verify agents using a layered system of confirmation: visual identification, behavioral matching, database records, and independent corroboration. Nothing makes it to the public without at least two solid confirmations. Three is preferred. It’s not just about accuracy. It’s about protection. For us, and for the truth.
Sometimes it starts with a video. An agent stepping out of an unmarked vehicle. We analyze the footage frame by frame. We look for identifiers: uniforms, badges, weapons, body language. We compare with previously known agents. If there’s a partial name badge visible, we use it. If a license plate shows up, we track it using publicly accessible databases and open-source tools.
Facial recognition helps, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Our volunteers are trained to spot recurring traits. We use side-by-side comparisons with verified past footage. We analyze background noise, street signs, timestamps, anything that helps establish context.
Each confirmed ID goes through a second process. We document everything: date, time, location, appearance, clothing, gear, vehicle, any interaction with the public, and any verbal identification made. Then we check again. Double confirmation is our standard. Triple confirmation is our preference.
We create individual agent profiles. These include all confirmed appearances, timestamps, and geographic movement. We track where agents have been deployed and what events they’ve been linked to. If a raid happened in Texas and that same agent appears at a courthouse in New York a month later, we note it.
We work with volunteers who specialize in facial recognition. We maintain a private archive of footage. We use satellite imagery and street view tools to confirm raid locations. We log field offices, staging areas, known facilities, and temporary hubs. We document repeat appearances and trace patterns of movement. Our goal isn’t just to identify one agent. It’s to identify networks. Patterns. Roles.
We have trackers for license plates, uniform details, equipment loadouts, and agency cross-over. We tag which agents are operating alongside contractors or local police. The more data we gather, the clearer the operational structure becomes.
We also track uncertainty. Our database includes categories for unconfirmed agents, unknown footage, and unidentified officers. Just because we don’t know who someone is yet doesn’t mean we won’t. Those profiles are tagged, revisited, and matched when new data comes in. Nothing is ever deleted. We revisit footage months later with new eyes, new tools, and sometimes new testimonies.
This part of the work is slow. But it’s vital. It stops innocent people from being falsely accused, and it protects the integrity of everything else we publish.
Sometimes we get lucky. A name tag, a leaked document, an internal memo. But we never publish unconfirmed names. If someone is listed on the ICE List, we are confident they were there. Not just probably. Confirmed. Seen. Recorded. Documented.
We include photographs, context, and a breakdown of how the ID was confirmed. We also timestamp the moment of release and any changes made later if further evidence strengthens the identification. Every profile is reviewed by at least two people before going live.
We’re not in the business of accusations. We’re in the business of evidence. This isn’t a witch hunt. It’s accountability. And everything we post reflects that.
If you’re wondering how we can be so sure, it’s because we’ve done the work. The real work. The quiet, slow, careful work of documenting a system that has relied for too long on anonymity. That time is over.
And we’re just getting started.
Bonus: A song about ICE that I created with two AI programs. Turn it up and resist!
Bonus #2: A song about Stephen “Goebbels/Pee-wee German” Miller.
An International Educator in Vietnam 
ICE’s America: Obey or Else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL7w80C4F_0
America’s GestapoWhat you can do to stop ICE’s mayhem
Robert Reich
Jan 16, 2026
Friends,
ICE and Border Patrol agents must be reined in. I’ll tell you how in a moment.
Since Renee Good’s death, clashes between ICE and the residents of Minneapolis have escalated. On Wednesday night, an ICE agent shot and wounded someone who, ICE claimed, was fleeing arrest. (Sure, just like Good supposedly was trying to run them over when she turned her car away from them and said, moments before an agent fired three bullets into her chest and head, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”)
I’ve always loved Minneapolis. Its people have midwestern common sense. They also have a deep sense of fairness and justice.
On Wednesday, Trump threatened that if Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota didn’t stop the protesters, whom he referred to as “insurrectionists,” he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT … and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”
Let’s be clear. The problem is not the protesters. It’s the armed thugs who are shooting and murdering them. (Trump seems capable of seeing a similar dynamic playing out in Iran and vows to protect the protesters there, but not in America.)
A friend who knows a lot more than I do about America’s armed forces recently wrote:
“There are four kinds of people who join the armed forces: those from a traditional military family, true patriots who want to serve their country, those with no other prospects who need a job, and psychotics who just want to kill people.
The armed services do a pretty decent job of screening out the fourth group, but that group is now the prime recruitment pool for ICE. Racists, haters, gun nuts, and cage fighting fans who want to shoot anyone the least bit different from them. They are becoming America’s Gestapo. That is no exaggeration. We’re slipping into Nazi Germany.”
He’s exactly right.
ICE is reportedly investing $100 million in what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed.
It has lowered its recruitment standards to meet the deportation targets set by Stephen Miller (Trump’s deputy chief of staff for promoting bigotry and nativism), thereby increasing the numbers of untrained and dangerous agents on the streets.
ICE’s recruitment is aimed at gun and military enthusiasts and people who listen to right-wing radio, have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races.
It’s seeking recruits who are willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”
If I had my way, ICE would be abolished and Border Patrol agents sent back to the border. But this isn’t going to happen under Trump and his Republican lapdogs in Congress. Too many Democrats are almost as spineless when it comes abolishing ICE.
But Congress can still take action to rein in ICE. At the very least, it must disarm ICE.
The Trump regime is allowing ICE officers to use lethal force in self-defense. But we’ve seen how readily ICE and Border Patrol agents claim self-defense when they’re shooting our compatriots.
How do we disarm ICE?
Congress is now considering the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding runs out at the end of January.
Please demand — call your members of Congress and tell them in no uncertain terms — that the DHS spending bill prohibit ICE and Border Patrol agents from carrying guns and that it unambiguously declare that agents do not have absolute immunity under the law if they harm civilians.
Do this as soon as you can.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee (and an old friend), said Tuesday that she’s seeking to put limits on ICE in the DHS spending bill. “I am looking for policy riders in the Homeland Security bill to [be] able to rein in ICE.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday that Democrats will oppose the bill unless Republicans agree to new rules governing ICE officers. “ICE cannot conduct itself as if it’s above the law.”
There is no reason for ICE agents to be armed. If they are shot at — and there’s no record of this ever actually happening — they could readily summon state or local police to protect their safety.
ICE was designed to be mainly an investigative agency, not a militarized arm of the presidency. ICE agents are not adequately trained to use deadly force.
In addition, ICE agents prowling our streets in unmarked cars, wearing masks, clad in body armor and carrying long guns, are a clear provocation to violence — both by them and by otherwise law-abiding residents of our towns and cities who feel they must stop their brutality.
Trump, Vance, and Miller want to provoke violent confrontations so they can justify even more oppression — including invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow Trump to call in the regular military. “I’d be allowed to do that,” Trump said in October, referring to the act, “and the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved, and I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted.”
Please: tell your members of Congress not to vote for the DHS spending bill unless it stipulates that ICE be disarmed.
Also tell them that the bill must restrict ICE and Border Patrol’s ability to conduct dragnet arrest operations and target people based on their race, language or accent. And the bill must clarify that ICE agents are liable under civil and criminal law if they harm civilians.
The Trump regime is telling agents they have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits if they kill or maim or otherwise hurt civilians. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” JD Vance said of the ICE agent who killed Renee Good. “He was doing his job.”
DHS went so far as to post a clip of Stephen Miller saying, “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
Rubbish. There’s no such absolute immunity under the law. Regardless of what the FBI concludes, I hope and expect the state of Minnesota will open a criminal investigation of the agent who murdered Renee Good and, on the basis of the evidence uncovered, prosecute him for murder under state law.
It would be useful for Congress to make it crystal clear in the DHS spending bill now under consideration that ICE agents do not enjoy absolute legal immunity.
Please call your representative and senators today and tell them not to vote for the DHS spending bill unless it (1) disarms ICE agents, (2) prevents them from targeting people based on their race, language, or accent, and (3) stipulates that agents who harm civilians are liable under criminal and civil laws.
To reach your representative or senator, call the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Tell them the state and city where you live. They will connect you to any member’s office.
Journalist Tests ICE Recruitment; Surprised to Find Herself Hired with No Background Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kGO6F_wHlc
The Trump Administration Is Calling My Viral Story a Lie. Good Thing I Kept the Receipts.The administration that lies all the time is lying about me. And I can prove it. (16.1.26) https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-trump-administration-dhs-minneapolis.html
You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We’re all finding out. (13.1.26) https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html
From Kent Nerburn on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knerburn
REPORT FROM THE FRONT — 16 January
Just came in from outside. Temperature pushing zero, razor blade wind blowing the snow sideways and cutting my face. Fingers numb and frozen. The kind of weather that makes our friends in other places ask, “How can you live in that?” About this time every year, we Minnesotans generally find ourselves asking the same question.
Well, we do live in it. And so do the demonstrators and, for the moment, so do the ICE agents who are roaming the streets tackling grandmothers and throwing tear gas canisters into cars full of children. And you can bet that none of them, ICE or demonstrators, is having a good time in the elements. This weather defeats the will, no matter who you are.
But one person whose will it does not defeat is Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump is not out in this weather. I doubt that he has ever been out in weather like this. I’ll bet he’s never even shoveled a sidewalk. He’s certainly never pushed a car out of a snowbank. He’s probably never even driven a car.
And therein lies a moment of hope in these dark times: Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue what the experience is like here on the ground. The distance between him and his foot soldiers is the distance between eating a Macdonald’s hamburger in front of the tv in the White House and dipping your hands in a cup of hot coffee on a frigid Minnesota street corner so your fingers don’t freeze solid from the cold.
And this distance means something.
Bear with me here.
The ICE agents, cruel thugs though they are in the aggregate, are very likely not all Proud Boys and Oathkeepers who have finally found a way to get paid for gleefully cracking some heads.
Some are probably men and women who signed on years ago because they believed that something had to be done about the border crisis that has plagued America for decades, and now are caught up in the hysteria of Trump’s forced confrontation.
Some are probably just folks who needed a job, saw the sign-on bonus and the good pay, and figured it would be a better way to feed their family than working at a loading dock at the strip mall or being a greeter at Walmart.
Chances are that all of them are right-leaning, but chances also are that not all of them are so right-leaning as to think it is acceptable to shoot a woman in the face or lob canisters of tear gas into cars full of children.
RIght now everyone is fueled by the adrenaline of rage. You can go a long way on anger and hate, and surely the ICE agents, no matter what their personal convictions, are riding on the wave of those dark emotions. The brutality and cruelty of their actions is unconscionable.
But it gets old sleeping in a motel bed, and it gets old going out in the street in zero degree temperatures with no sense of mission purpose or mission goal, neither of which their out-of-touch leader has provided. At some point, even for those with the most pathological love of violence, the interest and energy flags. At some point, they just want to go home.
But for those of us on the other side, this is home. And if history, both recent and ancient, teaches us anything, people defend their homes with a tenacity that is unexpected by those who come in from the outside to enforce their rules or value system. Ask the Vietnamese. Ask the Ukranians. Minneapolis is the place where we live, it is not where the majority of ICE agents live.
To be sure, Minneapolis isn’t all kumbaya. Neither is St. Paul. No city is. But the Somalis, the Mexicans, the whites, the Jews, the Blacks, the Russians, the Ecuadorians and everyone else are all our neighbors and all are folks who call this place home. And we are joining hands with a ferocity that I’m sure Donald and his sycophantic minions never expected. Also, you cannot discount the astonishing below-the-surface organizing that took place in the wake of the George Floyd murder and is surfacing now in service of resistance to Trump’s mad directives.
So as you fight off despair at this unimaginable nightmare of a descent into dictatorship at the hands of a mad king, remember that Donald Trump does not know what his ICE agents are going through and those ICE agents were not trained for what they are going through. In many cases it appears they were not trained at all. Now they are running through darkened streets, hounded and tracked by citizens, freezing in the Minnesota winter while the deranged head whose hands they are supposed to be is sitting in the White House eating hamburgers and watching tv.
Somewhere, inside them, as the subzero temperatures numb their toes and the wind cuts their faces, and they stare across the clouds of tear gas and plug their ears against the relentless shrill of whistles from demonstrators who will not back down, some part of them has to be thinking, “I just want to go home.”
Meanwhile, the Minnesotans, the ones joining hands and blowing the whistles, are already home.
Who, in the long run, do you want to bet on?
Andrew DeCort
Have you ever heard the saying, “How you do anything is how you do everything?”
I don’t believe that is always true. But it often is. The saying offers valuable provocation for self-examination. Its point is simple: the smallest things we do and say can offer profound insight into our character and the larger shape of our lives.
Now, Russell Vought is considered an “architect” of Project 2025. This is the 900-page blueprint for Trump’s second presidency. Many consider Vought an important figure in what we see happening in America today. Trump appointed him as the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget.
In 2023, Vought said something extremely significant:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains… We want to put them in trauma.”
This is an incredible statement of malicious intent. It articulates a conscious, premeditated desire to harm people and to reduce their lives to pain. Vought wanted people to be so villainized that they would be afraid to leave their homes.
At the time, Vought was seemingly “only” referring to his desire to villainize and traumatize “the bureaucrats.” But “how you do anything is how you do everything” – especially if it is consciously stated as your strategy for leadership.
And now we see Vought’s strategy being universalized. The US government is “putting” the general public “in trauma.” The terror of ICE is making countless people so afraid that they do “not want to go to work.”
Today was a significant milestone in my life as a US citizen. I received a message from a dear friend and fellow US citizen who was born and raised here. They are highly educated and highly accomplished. I have never seen any conspiratorial or paranoid tendencies in them. They’re as American as anyone else, except they also happen to be a non-white minority.
This afternoon they sent me their attorney’s contact information and started sharing their phone’s location with me so I can always trace their whereabouts. They requested that if I don’t hear from them for twenty-four hours to contact their attorney immediately.
To be clear, my friend is not “overreacting” or being “paranoid.” They are being wise and making preparations for the increasingly lawless condition of life in the United States. If they are disappeared, they want me to know what to do as their friend.
After I received my friend’s message, I quickly thought of Vought’s statement: “We want to put them in trauma.”
Mass trauma is the Maga game plan. It has been stated explicitly and clearly: to traumatize people, to villainlize people, and to make their lives so precarious that they don’t even want to leave their homes to go to work. In fact, now people feel afraid even in their own homes.
The irony is that the Trump regime incessantly lies, and yet they have told us everything we need to know about them, and we need to take them at their word. Their aim is to traumatize and villainize the public into terrified, exhausted submission.
How should we respond?
If you’re a white American like I am, I hope, like me, that you feel an extra responsibility at this time to use your privilege to nonviolently resist this regime and its pathological intent to traumatize this country into submission. We created this problem. (White America has been systematically traumatizing non-white Americans since 1776.) It is our responsibility to do everything we can to stop it.
If you are a faith leader, there is a nationwide protest for faith leaders happening in Minneapolis on January 22-23. I plan to be there. If you’re in the Chicago area and would like to carpool together, please reach out to me. Russell Vought also happens to be an Evangelical Christian and graduate of my beloved alma mater, Wheaton College. We must come together and raise a united voice against this horrific, anti-Christ corruption of our faith. The time is now. Refuse to be silent or passive.
We shall overcome. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Please share this invitation to protest widely.
https://www.marchminnesota.org/
ICEBlockSee something, tap something https://www.iceblock.app/ ICEBlock Removed
Following pressure from the Trump administration, Apple has removed ICEBlock from the App Store.
We are incredibly disappointed by Apple’s actions. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move. Apple has claimed they received information from law enforcement that ICEBlock served to harm law enforcement officers. This is patently false.
ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple’s own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.
We are determined to fight this with everything we have. Our mission has always been to protect our neighbors from the terror this administration continues to reign down on the people of this nation. We will not be deterred. We will not stop. #resist