Agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) have been advised to be on their toes if they are looking to add a little romance into their lives when they are not rounding up immigrants, according to a new report.
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The FBI’s Chicago field office sent a memo to law enforcement nationwide in February warning that “a small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement,” the Guardian reported Thursday.
The bureau said the profiles leaned on “a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic” designed to lure agents into a date, after which they’d be “publicly exposed and doxed online” to embarrass them and discourage enforcement work.
“The FBI’s ‘situational information report’ did not list the dating sites allegedly used by the women or where they were located, nor did it specify whether agents had actually been exposed,” The Guardian reported. “The memo aimed ‘to raise awareness’ about this doxing ‘technique,’ the FBI wrote, adding a disclaimer that the report was ‘not finally evaluated intelligence,'”
The warning came weeks after the New York Post ran a story claiming “lefty TikTokkers” were organizing women to expose ICE agents via dating apps, citing a screenshot from the right-wing account Libs of TikTok. That story had no interviews with anyone running the alleged scheme, no confirmed cases of agents being duped, and no mention of “tradwife” branding at all.
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That has led to skepticism that the FBI and ICE are being played — and not by women with fake profiles.
Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, was blunt about the memo and told The Guardian, “It’s absurd the FBI issued a thinly-sourced security alert about ICE agents’ online dating troubles, It’s equally ludicrous the FBI is spending taxpayer dollars to protect ICE agents from possible ’embarrassment.'”
Mike German, a former FBI agent who reviewed the document for the Guardian, said its lack of citations was telling.
“The rightwing echo chamber creates threats and the government’s intelligence apparatus just repeats those threats without any context,” he told the Guardian. “They must have run out of other threats.”
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