41,000+ US Immigration Agents Exposed in Major DHS Data Leak
More than 41,000 US Department of Homeland Security staff, including thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Protection officers, have had their names, work phone numbers and job details posted online. The leak reaches deep into the agencies that run arrests and deportation flights, and it lists operations that had never been public.
A hacking group called the Department of Peace said it took the records, and the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets published them in a database it named Icepick. The data covers more than 41,000 DHS personnel. More than 21,000 work for Customs and Border Protection and nearly 6,600 work for ICE, according to the files. Other records point to agents in Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Beyond names and contact details, the leak lists dozens of operation names and the agents who ran them, plus tools from Cellbrite and Palantir. A DHS spokesperson said the agency is “aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively,” adding that it takes “all security threats against our employees and officers seriously.”
For the officers who enforce US immigration law, the leak turns protected work details into an open list. Undercover agents, operation names and the technology behind raids are now visible to anyone online, including groups opposed to those operations. It is the third recent leak or hack aimed at a US government agency, and officials say they cannot yet confirm how far the damage reaches.
What is in the Icepick database?
The Department of Peace said its goal was to trade what it called anonymity for accountability. Emma Best, a co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, described the release as a map of the officials behind secret operations, the internal hunt for government leakers and staff tied to deportation programs. Distributed Denial of Secrets had also hosted BlueLeaks, a 2020 dump of US police data. A spokesperson for the Department of Peace aimed its work directly at ICE. “On July 17th, Markwayne Mullin said he was ‘turning up the heat’. This is what happens to ICE when you do that,” the spokesperson wrote. Mullin, who became Homeland Security Secretary in March, has pushed harder enforcement in recent months.
Is the DHS data leak real? A DHS spokesperson confirmed the agency is aware of a possible breach and is working to contain it, and the database was posted online by the whistleblower group. The full scope is still being assessed. The exposure of sensitive FBI records in other recent cases shows how quickly government files can reach the public.
The most sensitive part is not the contact details but the operation names. A phone number can be changed; a record showing which agent led a months-long undercover operation cannot. That is what turns a data breach into an ongoing safety problem for officers and the people working with them.
DHS says it will share more once its review is done. For now, the agency has not said how many of the named operations are still active or what steps it will take to protect the officers on the list. Check back for updates as the story develops.
