New York, NY – An adjunct professor from New York University created a database of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees using the social media platform LinkedIn, and shared it via social media.
Sam Lavigne, whose website lists New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts among his employers, created a database that included the names of 1,595 ICE employees and shared it to his 3,600 followers on Twitter on Tuesday morning, The Daily Caller reported.
“I’ve downloaded and made available the profiles of (almost) everyone on LinkedIn who works for ICE, 1,595 people in total. While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists, and activists will find it useful,” Lavigne wrote in a now-deleted Medium blog post, according to The Daily Caller.
The database contains information from the ICE employee’s LinkedIn pages that included their full names, the cities in which they live, and their role at the federal immigration agency.
Within hours, the database had been disseminated by Antifa, an organization that U.S. security agencies have labeled domestic terrorists.
The database was also shared on a Reddit subgroup that encouraged the doxxing of those whom they consider to be “Nazis” or “alt-right.” Doxxing is the practice of spreading someone’s personal information for nefarious purposes.
“Doxxing ICE agents is good and moral,” one Reddit user posted on the database thread, The Daily Caller reported.
Law enforcement, and border patrol officers and agents specifically, have been under attack for enforcing President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy along the border, which has resulted in numerous families being separated when the parents were arrested for breaking the law.
Despite the fact that the same laws and policies existed and were enforced under two prior presidential administrations, the current President and his ICE enforcement agents have been demonized and threatened.
On Thursday, President Trump announced he would issue an order to end family separation at the border; however, that order is expected to violate a 1997 consent decree, according to The New York Times.
Lavigne also tweeted a screenshot of ICE’s chief technology officer’s personal Twitter page, including a picture of the official with his son, The Daily Caller reported.
Eventually, the platform where Lavigne published the database removed the page because it violated its terms of service.
“We removed the project because it violates our community guidelines,” a GitHub spokesperson said. “In general, we have policies against use of GitHub for doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party’s privacy.”
However, an Internet archive of the database had already been captured and shared to Antifa followers, The Daily Caller reported.
