Doxxing Ice Officers Is a Bad Idea No Matter What Side You're On

Look to history to work through the details - BCB #179

Yesterday, the identities of 4,500 ICE agents were publicly leaked. I have seen earlier suggestions that protesters should organize to systematically de-anonymize ICE agents. You may already believe this is bad, either because you support ICE or because you suspect it will backfire. Or you may find this tactic appealing as a form of non-violent organized resistance. Either way I want to work through the logic of the idea, because of what we might learn about assessing protest tactics in general.

Also, I want to discourage people from doing it because I think it will most likely lead to bad outcomes for pretty much everybody. My argument is based on three real-world examples: the doxxing of alt-right figures post-Charlottesville, the harassment of abortion providers, and the de-anonymization of police during the Hong Kong democracy protests.

I’m mostly uninterested in arguments about what does and doesn’t count as doxxing and whether or not it’s legal. What I want to know is: what would result from an organized exposure campaign as a civil resistance tactic?

The logic of forced visibility

The obvious reason that ICE agents are masked is to prevent their systematic targeting for harassment or violence. However, this very naturally can make it harder to identify specific officers who may be involved in corrupt, unsafe, or illegal activities. Many local police forces require officers to wear ID for this reason. No American law enforcement agency has ever been masked before (except for special units like SWAT teams).

There’s a pretty well developed theory along these lines called “sousveilance,” meaning surveillance from underneath. The notion is that if “they” can spy on us, then “we” can spy on them to close the accountability gap.

All very neat, but the writing on this topic is academic in the sense that it mostly considers what is just, not what is effective. Also, accountability per se doesn’t seem to be the main motivation for previous doxxing campaigns; instead the victims are simply assumed culpable by virtue of class membership. To get a better grip on how this actually plays out, let’s turn to history.

The Alt-Right campaign

After Charlottesville’s “Unite The Right” rally, there was a campaign to identify and expose attendees. This might be the closest cultural analogy, as I’m sure many of the people who now support doxxing ICE then supported doxxing alt-righters. The tactic worked by attempting to cancel people, and it was effective. Many of those exposed were fired, and the campaign seemed to lead to people leaving the movement and groups closing down.

The logic here is something like: raise the social cost of publicly participating in alt-right activities, so that individuals decide not to. It’s directly aimed at removing people from the public sphere, and this is one the first reasons doxxing is suspect. Even in the throes of Gamergate, Ijeoma Oluo wrote,

doxxing isn’t about accountability, it’s about silencing. Techniques designed to intimidate people out of the public sphere are wrong, no matter who is doing it.

On a practical level, two can play the game of shutting down speech through mass harassment, and they do. Plenty of folks on the left have been doxxed, and remember that about 40% of Americans currently approve of what is ICE is doing. Any weapon that your opponent can instantly turn on you isn’t much of a weapon at all.

Even so, does this example show that doxxing could, in theory, deter ICE officers? I don’t think so. As applied to ICE, the goal wouldn’t be silencing individual officers but imposing costs on occupying a specific role.

Doxxing abortion providers

Role-based deterrence—making an occupation itself carry personal costs—has a clearer precedent: the decades-long campaign against abortion providers. The goal of doxxing doctors was “to deter them from providing their services and discourage others from entering the field.”

And it worked. Research shows that “intimidation and stigmatization by opponents have deterred abortion providers,” with past studies citing “safety concerns and professional discrimination as reasons why resident physicians intending to practice changed their minds.” Even pre-Dobbs, nearly 90 percent of US counties had no providers.

However, there are again important differences from the ICE case. Doctors were doxxed, but eight were also murdered—meaning that the deterrence was credible. And critically, abortion providers were private practitioners operating without institutional backing, often against state hostility. ICE officers are in the opposite situation.

Hong Kong democracy protests

The closest parallel for ICE is Hong Kong, where protesters systematically doxxed police officers during the 2019-2020 protests. The context was similar: officers had stopped wearing ID cards and some hid their faces, making accountability impossible through normal channels. By June 2020, over 1,800 officers and family members had been doxxed; some received thousands of harassment calls, or had their information used to apply for fraudulent loans. Police recruiting dropped 40% while departures increased 40%.

Then the government retaliated. Anti-doxxing legislation “sought to protect police and other public servants from doxxing by protesters, not the other way around,” while a CCP-linked counter-doxxing site targeting 2,000 protesters remained online. Protestor doxxing imposed real costs on individual officers but didn't shift the underlying power dynamic, and the legal infrastructure built to respond became another tool of repression.

Better strategy

These cases suggest that public de-anonymization could indeed succeed in imposing costs on officers — both to reputation and to safety — but what’s the endgame?

A clear strategy should articulate a goal and a path to reach it. Doxxing didn’t destroy the Hong Kong police and it won’t destroy ICE. Mere pain can force an opponent to negotiate, but there has to be something they can give up to stop the hurt. Otherwise, the only reasonable response is to retaliate.

Furthermore, threatening the safety of people with guns who are already scared is going to get more people killed. Even if a would-be doxxer only harasses, never actually harms, stochastic terrorism is now an unfortunate reality in American politics.

I do think ICE officers should be identifiable when performing their duties, at least at the level of a badge number. There is various legislation pending to require that. But this would not resolve the underlying conflict.

But there is something that protestors could usefully demand: immigration reform that both secures the border and legalizes the people already here. As we’ve noted before, this is a popular compromise. The ideal pressure strategy would be safe for protestors, safe for law enforcement, widely seen as legitimate, easy for many people to participate in, and sustainable. It would create material but non-violent costs, and it would be coupled with well-defined policy demands. Mass doxxing of ICE officers isn’t any of that. Maybe no perfect tactic exists, but there are lots and lots of alternatives.