ICE Agents Accidentally Add Random Person to Group Chat, Uncover Highly Sensitive Data

“I saw the rap sheet and license plate numbers and was like WTAF.”

Mass Text

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents accidentally added a random person to a mass group text in which officers from multiple federal law enforcement agencies discussed extremely sensitive information about arrests, targets, and strategy.

As 404 Media reports, the group text was titled “Mass Text” and included an unredacted ICE document titled “Field Operations Worksheet.” The document included “detailed information” about the person the agency was searching for: a convicted attempted murderer who agents were seeking to find and deport. The texts also revealed that agents were drawing on resources like DMV data and license plate readers to aid their search.

“At first I thought it was just another series of spam messages like I get all the time from home improvement, car insurance, business loans, etc,” the unnamed person who was added to the chat, who isn’t in law enforcement in any capacity, told 404 Media. “Then I saw the rap sheet and license plate numbers and was like WTAF.”

It’s one thing for an everyday citizen to accidentally send a birthday invite to the wrong number. But these are federal agents imbued with a massive amount of power and money who, as they push to meet impossible deportation quotas, have made a series of alarming errors — ranging from adding random numbers to group chats to deporting the wrong people, kids allegedly included.

“This breach strikes me as indicative of the current carelessness of officers,” an unnamed Department of Homeland Security official told 404. “They’re concerned about pumping up arrest numbers, not about operating with the level of care and rigor we should expect from law enforcement officials.”

Untitled Chat

The incident echoes the Signal scandal from earlier this year, in which US Secretary of Defense and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth shared sensitive war plans in a group chat that included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg was mistakenly added to the confidential chat by then-National Security Advisor Michael Waltz.

In this case, though, there’s one major glaring difference. While the Signal scandal was hugely embarrassing and certainly not up to the security standards required at that level of government, it at least took place over a service that offers end-to-end encryption.

The ICE chat, in contrast, occurred over regular old Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages, which is a much less secure way for law enforcement agents of the federal government to yap about DMV data and deportation targets.

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