Immigration

Data on 41,000+ Homeland Security workers published in searchable leak

Washington, D.C. • October 29, 2026 • By Press Pass USA

Editorial illustration: a laptop showing blurred data and a padlock symbol in front of a government building at night

Editorial illustration — Press Pass USA

A nonprofit transparency group published a searchable database on Wednesday containing personnel records for more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors, including staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, in one of the largest disclosures of federal employee information in recent memory.

Distributed Denial of Secrets said it obtained the data from a hacktivist group calling itself the Department of Peace, which built a search tool called Icepick that lets the public look up employees by name, office and assignment. The records can include names, job titles, work email addresses, phone numbers and office locations, along with internal group memberships that map who had access to systems such as Microsoft 365 and surveillance tools including PenLink and the Mobile Fortify facial-recognition app.

About 21,000 of the entries concern Customs and Border Protection personnel and about 10,000 relate to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations, according to TechCrunch's account of the dataset, with nearly 1,000 tied to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. TechCrunch said it verified some of the data and that timestamps indicate it was exported around mid-August.

The Department of Peace claims it obtained the data through an Okta single sign-on instance used by the department, a claim that remains unverified: Okta said its systems and data were not breached, and the department had not given a full public account of the incident. A Homeland Security spokesperson had not responded to a request for comment, according to the TechCrunch report.

“This dataset is massive in terms of both size and impact,” activist Maia Arson Crimew said in a statement issued by Distributed Denial of Secrets, adding that it provides “an unprecedented look into the Department of Homeland Security's organisational structure.” The group's co-founder, Emma Best, described the leak as “extraordinary” and said it identifies officials overseeing covert and undercover operations and deportation programs. Advocates say the contact details will help targeted public-records requests and investigations, while officials warn the release raises safety and operational risks for the employees named.

Sources: AFP via TBS News (Oct 29, 2026); TechCrunch (Oct 29, 2026).