You’ve seen the never before seen videos and first hand accounts of all the ICE violence pulled from multiple social media platforms. Countless hours of fact checking and verifying, doing the humanitarian work of getting real-time information to the public. A true service to people. Keeping us all informed of the horrors happening in our neighborhoods. I wanted to know the faceless person behind it all. So I reached out.
I asked the person behind it all if they would be willing to do a live conversation, here on Substack. But, given the nature of the work, and the very real risks that come with it, they asked to remain anonymous instead. I respect that. This work is too important to lose the person behind running it’s operations. We agreed a written interview made more sense, both for their safety and so they could answer with the honesty this kind of documentation demands.
How Did This Start?
Eyes on ICE didn’t begin as a platform. It began on Reddit, in r/publicfreakout, where the founder posted for years because, as they put it, “I saw a massive need to counter dogwhistle racism, hate and harassment.” Over time the focus shifted “heavily toward civil rights, police accountability, LGBTQ+ issues, and federal immigration enforcement.”
The moderators didn’t agree with the shift though.
“My social justice posts were not well received by the moderators, and I was told it was not a place for it many times.”
The founder kept posting anyway, so often that the subreddit wrote a rule specifically to deal with it. The new rule was they couldn’t post more that three times a day because the moderators couldn’t keep up with the workload of moderating the posts. But, that didn’t stop them.
“My stubbornness got the best of me, and I kept posting as I did.”
The breaking point came when they tried to expose an organized group intentionally harassing users, and in the process “pushed past platform boundaries, driven by the belief that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That clash ended in a permanent ban and with it, “the sudden erasure of years of civil rights archiving.”
The timing made it even worse. That archive vanished “right as ICE enforcement was reaching a fever pitch,” and “relying on third party platforms left vital public records vulnerable to the arbitrary post limits and sudden deletion.” The solution was “a dedicated, independent hub solely focused on pattern tracking and accountability, free from corporate moderation constraints.”
The founder attributed that loss directly to the birth of “Eyes On ICE.”
How Do You Verify A Tip At 2 AM?
“I have to be honest. In the early days, I moved too fast to get information out. That led to mistakes that should not have happened.”
All amateur reporters and journalists have been there at some point, myself included, especially now, when we are being water-hosed with information from all angles. Learning on the fly. We fail fast, learn fast.
There’s no newsroom behind Eyes On ICE’s operation. No fact-checking desk, no second set of eyes before something goes live. “Operating without a traditional newsroom full of fact checkers meant that any error fell squarely on me, and those early missteps taught me the ultimate lesson. Speed means nothing if the data is wrong. Accuracy has to come above everything else, especially when people’s safety is on the line.”
So, the process now is deliberately slow, even when the news isn’t. “My verification process requires total immersion,” the founder says, describing roughly ten hours per day “scouring social media, regional newsrooms, local forums, government contracts and public communities to track incidents and spot operational patterns.”
On top of that daily monitoring, tips arrive directly from people on the ground who need to stay anonymous — a boundary the founder says they take very seriously, “I completely respect their desire to stay out of the public eye, as I value my own privacy while doing this work.”
When a tip comes in at 2 AM, it doesn’t go straight up to the platform. “I do not just broadcast it. I dive straight into the deep end to verify it. I watch live video feeds, dredge through municipal records, search state LLC filings, and comb through government procurement databases.”
Part of what makes this slow is what it’s up against. In the founder’s words, “the federal government is impressive when it comes to hiding information in plain sight,” using “shell companies, LLC drop sites and sole purpose contracts to conceal their intentions from the very communities they target with warehouse detention centers, training facilities and expanded logistics hubs.”
The countermeasure is to fight fire with fire.
“I run agentic A.I. models locally on my home lab for deep pattern recognition,” the founder says — an approach they acknowledge “might sound controversial to some” but that makes it possible to “scrape complex procurement records, cross reference contract filings and synthesize massive databases so nothing gets missed.”
And when a mistake slips through anyway, the response is immediate, not defensive. “I pull the incorrect post down, issue a transparent retraction, apologize and admit that I need to do better.”
How Do You Keep A.I. From Surfacing A Pattern That Isn’t There?
This is something I thought had important relevance to ask directly, given how deliberately confusing shell company and LLC filings are designed to be and given that getting it wrong once already cost the founder dearly.
“A.I. is only as good as the underlying models and the operator behind them. If you treat it like a toaster, it will act like a toaster. If you use it as an extension of your own analytical abilities, it becomes an invaluable tool.”
The founder walked me through a real case. An old Pep Boys warehouse in Westchester, NY, that ICE intended to convert into a detention center. The Monroe Gazette had already reported findings, which the founder then synthesized and distilled using A.I. and LLMs. But the A.I. output was the starting point, not the whole story. “Once I had the data points, I spent hours manually digging through news archives, court records and government databases.”
What that manual digging turned up was a textbook obfuscation move. “To obscure the purchase, the federal government utilized a notorious LLC mailing address that housed hundreds of separate corporate entities.” The shell company traced back to Puerto Rico, somewhere Westchester residents wouldn’t never thought to look at. And local officials vehemently denied was happening at all.
The takeaway, is the closest thing to an operating principle here, “relying blindly on any A.I. system to provide absolute answers is foolish and dangerous. Slow, methodical, primary research is non-negotiable. Every output must be doubted, independently verified and checked against confirmation bias.”
Has ICE, DHS, Or Any Law Enforcement Agency Tried to Identify You?
“Surprisingly, ICE and DHS have not reached out to me directly,” the founder told me. Everything published sits on First Amendment ground, though the founder was careful not to overstate what that protects. “In our current political environment, constitutional protections do not necessarily stop federal enforcement from attempting overreach.” As for why no contact so far, “my logic is simple: if they want to find me, they would.”
Part of the basis for that confidence is Reddit’s own fight to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to identify anonymous users. There was a case where ICE sought to force the platform to unmask the identity of a Reddit user who had criticized the agency online. Reddit fought back aggressively, challenging the demand. After the government failed to prevail through the initial court process, it reportedly escalated the effort through a grand-jury subpoena. But the case against the user was ultimately thrown out, reinforcing the view that the effort to unmask them was legally weak and that Reddit was prepared to defend its users’ privacy.
How Do You Vet Anonymous Tips Themselves?
If a bad A.I. pattern is one failure mode, a purposefully false tip planted is another. The founder said it’s a risk they think about constantly.
“The possibility of a poison well scenario is always top of mind. I operate under the baseline assumption that any incoming tip could be deliberate disinformation designed to undermine an investigation.”
The process leans on open source intelligence methods. “Every tip is rigorously cross referenced through public records and independent data before it is taken seriously.” Source identities stay locked down regardless of what a tip turns into, “to protect those who come forward.” The founder went on to say that “blindly chasing leads from actors who may have ulterior motives would represent a complete operational failure on my part.”
Not All Heroes Wear Capes
I’m grateful to the founder of Eyes On ICE for taking the time to collaborate with me for this written interview, especially knowing the risks that come with the work they are doing and the reasons they have chosen to remain anonymous. What comes through in this conversation is not simply a commitment to documenting what is happening, but a commitment to doing it carefully, responsibly and with the understanding that behind every data point, video and tip are real people and real communities.
In a moment when information can disappear as quickly as it appears, documenting, verifying and preserving these accounts matters. So does the willingness to keep looking when the answers are intentionally difficult to find. Whatever challenges lie ahead, I hope the founder continues this work and continues building Eyes On ICE into the independent record they envisioned — because this kind of documentation, accountability and public service is deeply important. To the founder, thank you for trusting me with your story, and for continuing to do the work.
Find them on Reddit r/EyesOnICE and on Substack Eyes On Ice.
You can also find them on X: Eyes On ICE
To provide financial support: Eyes On ICE
Please interview @Karishma Manzur, PhD she is running for Senate and her opponent is Centrist Corporate Dem Chris Pappas! New poll shows she is gaining and we need all hands on deck to win!
Great work, Eevie!