The Trump administration has sued at least five US states and the city of Philadelphia over laws requiring law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, to show their faces and wear identifying markers during operations. Federal lawyers argue such rules would endanger ICE officers by making it easier for the public to identify and track them, pointing specifically to facial recognition tools such as the art project ICESpy. The dispute matters because it pits state-level police accountability efforts against federal claims of officer safety, with courts likely to decide whether masking bans can stand.

However, ICESpy's own creator, artist Kyle McDonald, disputes the administration's claims, saying the tool's database is built from roughly 700 LinkedIn profiles of people who self-identified as ICE staff around 2018, with only a few dozen holding front-line titles such as deportation officer. Since then ICE has more than doubled its enforcement staff to 22,000, meaning most current agents would not appear in the database at all. WIRED found the site had just 84 page views and only two face-match attempts in a recent week, both apparently unsuccessful, undermining claims that it poses a genuine doxing threat. A second site cited in the lawsuits, ICE List, similarly relies largely on old, self-reported LinkedIn data.