Data on more than 41,000 employees of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has leaked into the public domain, it was announced on Wednesday. The leaked data includes the names, work addresses and phone numbers of DHS staff, including agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The data was published by a group called Department of Peace together with cybersecurity researcher and hacker mai crimew. They placed it in a database called Icepick and shared it via a website hosted by Distributed Denial of Secrets. According to figures from the published data, more than 21,000 agents work for CBP, while nearly 6,600 agents work for ICE. Other records show agents from Homeland Security Investigations, Federal Protective Service and individuals working for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The leaked data also included dozens of previously unknown operation names, the agents who led and worked on those operations, and some technologies they used in their work, including technology provided by Cellbrite and Palantir. The groups wrote in an online statement that the leaked data was not intended as a directory of every DHS agent. The aim was to replace "anonymity with accountability", according to Emma Best, co-founder of DDoSecrets. BlueLeaks refers to the mass leak of US police data in 2020, whose data was also hosted by DDoSecrets.
A spokesperson for Department of Peace directly pointed to the conduct of ICE agents as the reason for the group's work in hacking DHS records. On Wednesday, he wrote: "On July 17th, Markwayne Mullin said he was turning up the heat. This is what happens to ICE when you do that." Mullin became Secretary of Homeland Security in March. Department of Peace stated that it accessed DHS agent profiles via a single sign-on service called Okta, a popular online security tool that organisations use to ensure that only people with access to internal platforms log in to them. An Okta spokesperson said the company was aware of the claims made, but stated: "Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised."
Last month, the FBI was hacked by a group called ShinyHunters, which took personal data on thousands of agents. The Federal Election Commission, which publishes data on political campaign donations, was recently offline due to a suspected hacking attempt. Immigration operations this year have become violent on multiple occasions, with ICE agents shooting more than two dozen people and killing at least nine. The killings include the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were shot and killed by ICE agents in Minnesota this year, although they were not targets of arrest.
ICE agents often conduct enforcement actions while their faces are covered by masks and sunglasses. Immigration agents rarely identify themselves, although they are legally required to do so, and US politicians have publicly demanded that DHS enforce this requirement. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, the US has carried out nearly 1 million deportations, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute, and more than 70 per cent of deportations were of people without a criminal record.
