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The ICE List Wiki is a public, verifiable record of immigration enforcement activity in the United States.
It documents incidents, agencies, individuals, facilities, vehicles, and legal authorities involved in enforcement operations.
Entries are structured, sourced, and timestamped to support verification, cross-referencing, and long-term analysis.
The wiki is intended for use by journalists, researchers, advocates, and the general public.
Project status: This wiki is
in active development. Structure, navigation, and data standards are
being finalised. Older pages may be reformatted as standards are applied
consistently.
Using the data
The ICE List Wiki is designed for public use.
Journalists, researchers, and advocacy groups use the data to track
enforcement patterns, identify repeat agencies or jurisdictions, and
contextualise individual incidents.
Pages may be cited with attribution.
Warning: Do Not Use Ring Cameras
Amazon’s Ring cameras are integrated into U.S. law-enforcement
workflows. Police agencies can request footage directly from Ring users,
allowing private home surveillance video to be shared with law
enforcement.
In 2025, Ring partnered with Flock Safety, further linking
consumer cameras to nationwide law-enforcement surveillance platforms.
Civil-liberties groups warn this expands surveillance with
limited transparency or oversight. ICE List strongly recommends against
purchasing or using Ring cameras.
U.S. Border Patrol agent identified through public reporting and
FOIA-linked records as participating in an interior immigration
enforcement operation in the Chicago metropolitan area, including the
October 31, 2025 Evanston incident involving the assault of a handcuffed
individual following a vehicle crash.
In the news
Recent ICE-related reporting from external news organisations.
2025-11-18:Maryland bill would ban local 287(g) agreements statewide
— Del. Nicole Williams plans to reintroduce a bill to prohibit 287(g)
agreements in Maryland, with new backing from the state Senate
president, signaling growing political resistance to local ICE
partnerships.
2025-11-18:Lawsuit over conditions at California City Detention Facility
— Seven people detained at California’s largest immigration detention
facility filed a federal lawsuit describing sewage bubbling up from
drains, lack of medical care, frigid cells, and people forced to rewrap
open wounds with dirty bandages at the privately run California City
Detention Facility.
2025-11-18:Lawsuit targets conditions at Broadview ICE facility outside Chicago
— People detained at Broadview allege prolonged confinement in freezing
holding cells, sleep deprivation, and denial of basic medical care,
turning the suburban processing center into a site of chronic abuse for
those in ICE custody.
2025-11-18:Bucks County sheriff who joined 287(g) program voted out of office
— Voters removed the sheriff who signed Bucks County into ICE’s 287(g)
program after the agreement became the central issue of the race; the
sheriff-elect has vowed to end the partnership immediately.
2025-11-06: [shots, 7 holes': Border Patrol supervisor appeared to brag about shooting woman]
— A Border Patrol supervisor who shot a woman after a crash in Chicago
allegedly texted “5 shots, 7 holes,” and a judge is now examining
whether federal agents mishandled key evidence by releasing his SUV
before defense experts could inspect it.
ICE agents, including Moore, Arian S.,
fatally shot Silverio Villegas González during an immigration
enforcement operation in a residential area outside Chicago. ICE claimed
the shooting was justified by a vehicle-related threat, but body-worn
camera footage, witness accounts, and independent reporting have raised
serious questions about the accuracy of the official narrative.
Some agents documented in photos, videos, or incident reports have
not yet been identified by name.
These entries are published to allow journalists, researchers, and the
public to help recognise individuals based on uniforms, context, or
other verifiable details.
Each page includes a verification status indicating whether claims
are supported by public records, media, video evidence, or other
documentation.
Unverified information is clearly labelled and is not presented as
established fact.
Pages may be updated as additional sources become available.
Quick links
How to report an incident
Step-by-step instructions for submitting an incident with enough detail to verify and map it.
Volunteer guide
Orientation for new volunteers, from research tasks to safety and OPSEC basics.
Deportation agents
Overview of ICE ERO officers, how we document them, and how to read agent pages.
State directory
Browse state-specific portals documenting facilities, incidents, agents, and 287(g) agreements.
Submissions should be factual, specific, and supported by evidence where possible.
Speculation, harassment, or unverifiable claims are not published.
Contributors are encouraged to prioritise accuracy over speed.
U.S.
President Donald Trump is applying severe economic pressure to an
already-strained Cuba mired in a food and power crisis. Andrew Chang
explains why the U.S. is choosing now to cut off the country's oil
supply, and why, for Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it's
also personal.
A deep-injection well used for disposal of wastewater. Kern County,
in California’s San Joaquin Valley, is located over the Monterey Shale
and has seen a dramatic increase in oil drilling and hydraulic fracking
in recent years.
Citizens of the Planet/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
The Oil Industry’s Latest Disaster: Trillions of Gallons of Buried Toxic Wastewater
This story is published in partnership with DeSmog, the climate investigations site.
A
cache of government documents dating back nearly a century casts serious doubt on the safety of the oil
and gas industry’s most common method for disposing of its annual
trillion gallons of toxic wastewater: injecting it deep underground.
Despite knowing by the early 1970s that injection wells were at best a makeshift solution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) never followed its own determination that they should be “a
temporary means of disposal,” used only until “a more environmentally
acceptable means of disposal [becomes] available.”
The documents include scientific research, internal communications, and
talks given at a December 1971 industry and government symposium. And
they come from multiple federal agencies, including the EPA, the U.S.
Department of Energy, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
The documents show there may be little scientific merit to industry and
government claims that injection wells are a safe means of disposal —
putting drinking water and other mineral resources in communities across
the country at risk of contamination, and jeopardizing local economies
and public health.
The U.S. oil and gas industry produces 25.9 billion barrels of wastewater each year
(or 1.0878 trillion gallons), according to the most recent data
available, a 2022 report from the Groundwater Protection Council that
relies on 2021 data. That’s enough to form a line of waste barrels to
the moon and back 28 times.
This wastewater — variously referred to by the industry as “produced
water,” “brine,” “salt water,” or simply “water” — comes to the surface
naturally during extraction of oil and gas. Some 96 percent, 24.8
billion barrels, is disposed of by injecting it back underground.
In 2020, there were 181,431 injection wells
(referred to in some regions as saltwater disposal wells or SWDs) in
the United States, according to an EPA fact sheet — roughly 11 injection
wells for every Starbucks across the country. If you drove from New
York City to Los Angeles at 65 miles per hour and lined the highway with
them, you would pass an oil and gas wastewater injection well every
nine-tenths of a second.
These injection wells dispose of a complex brew of wastewater by
shooting it deep underground. According to one oil and gas industry
explanation of the wastewater disposal process, liquid waste is injected
underground at high pressure into an “injection layer,” a targeted
layer of rock containing a considerable amount of “pore space”: gaps
between the rock grains that compose it. This injection layer fills up
with the wastewater, while surrounding layers of impermeable rock act as
seals to prevent the waste from leaking out.
Editor’s picks
But oil and gas industry wastewater can contain toxic levels of salt,
carcinogenic substances, and heavy metals, and often far more than
enough of the radioactive element radium to be defined by the EPA as radioactive waste. Radium has been described by researchers as a bone-seeker
because it can mimic calcium and once inside the body may be
incorporated into bones — it’s what killed the early 20th century
factory workers known as the Radium Girls, who used a radium-based radioactive paint to make watches glow in the dark and kept their brushes firm by licking the tips.
Five women known as the “Radium Girls,” after settling their
lawsuit against their employer, U.S. Radium Corp., in Newark, New
Jersey, 1928
Underwood Archives/Getty Images
“These contaminants pose serious threats to human health,” says Amy
Mall, director of the fossil fuels team at the Natural Resources Defense
Council (NRDC). “Every day in the U.S., the oil and gas industry
generates billions of gallons of this dangerous wastewater.”
Related Content
Other industries also use injection wells to dispose of dangerous waste, such as the pharmaceutical and steel industries, slaughterhouses, and pesticide manufacturers.
While the USGS has linked injection wells to damaging earthquakes, both
the oil and gas industry and government regulators claim they are safe
to use for wastewater disposal. But these historic documents suggest
that they have long known otherwise.
Deep-well injection is “a technology of avoiding problems, not solving
them in any real sense,” stated Stanley Greenfield, the EPA Assistant
Administrator for Research and Monitoring, in a 1971 talk at the
“Underground Waste Management and Environmental Implications” symposium
in Houston, Texas. “We really do not know what happens to the wastes
down there,” Greenfield said. “We just hope.”
A Hundred Years of Alarm Bells
Wastewater has plagued the petroleum industry since its earliest days
in western Pennsylvania 150 years ago. For its first century, drillers
directed wastewater into pits dug beside the well, or intentionally
dumped it into ditches, streams, swamps, or bayous. In one instance in
1920s Mississippi, wastewater was stored in a wood-sided swimming pool
for children.
The first allusion to disposal by underground injection appeared in a
1929 report from the U.S. Department of the Interior: “The disposal of
oil-field brines by returning them to a subsurface formation, from the
information thus far obtained, appears to be feasible in isolated
instances.” However, the next lines warned: “Not only is there danger
that the water will migrate to fresh-water sands and pollute a potable
water supply, but also there is an ever-present possibility that this
water may endanger present or future oil production.”
By the mid-20th century, the industry realized that injecting
wastewater could be useful in another way: for pushing hard-to-reach oil
lingering in some rock formations up to the surface. This technique,
called waterflooding or enhanced oil recovery, generated a significant fraction of the oil produced in the U.S. from the 1950s through the early 1990s.
With the passage in 1972 of the Clean Water Act, industries were forced
to stop dumping their wastes into rivers, where it poisoned wildlife,
fouled fresh water supplies, and caused ugly slicks that occasionally
caught fire. This directly drove massive growth in underground disposal,
a transition captured in the EPA documents of the era.
“Little attention was given this technique until the 1960s,” stated a 1974 EPA report
on injection wells, “when the diminishing capabilities of surface
waters to receive effluents, without violation of standards, made
disposal and storage of liquid wastes by deep well injection
increasingly more attractive.”
In 1950, there were just four industrial injection wells in the United
States, and in 1967 there were 110. That number would increase more than
1,000-fold in the coming decades, despite the concerns of some
prominent early critics. In October 1970, David Dominick, the
commissioner of the Federal Water Quality Administration (which would be
merged into the EPA two months later), warned that injection was a
short-term fix to be used with caution and “only until better methods of
disposal are developed.”
Late the following year, in December 1971, some of the 50-odd speakers
at the four-day “Underground Waste Management and Environmental
Implications” symposium in Houston expressed optimism about injection
wells. Vincent McKelvey, a USGS research director and the symposium’s
keynote speaker, said he believed the subterranean earth represented “an
underutilized resource with a great potential for contribution to
national needs.”
Many more at the event, which was organized by the American Association
of Petroleum Geologists and the USGS, were not so sure. In hindsight,
the reservations they shared during the symposium are accurate
predictions of injection well problems to come.
One Utah geologist warned that injecting chemical-filled waste deep
into the earth could affect the strength of rocks and how they interact
with one another. “The result could be earthquakes,” he said, that would
create fractures which could channel waste out of the injection zone. A
Department of Energy researcher said the disposal of radioactive liquid
wastes, even in low concentrations, posed “a particularly vexing
problem.”
A Wyoming law professor offered “not a cheerful” message: “If you goop
up someone’s water supply with your gunk; if you render unusable a
valuable resource a neighboring landowner might have recovered; or if
you ‘grease’ the rocks, cause an earthquake, and shake down his house —
the law will make you pay.”
USGS hydrologist Robert Stallman conjectured — with some accuracy, as
it has turned out — that the consequences of injecting large amounts of
liquid waste underground would include pollution of groundwater and
surface water, changes to the permeability of rocks, cave-ins,
earthquakes, and contamination of underground oil and gas deposits.
Homeowner and environmental scientist Lisa Griggs looks at
one of many cracks in her home that she believes are directly caused by
ongoing earthquakes in Guthrie, Oklahoma, on Jan. 26, 2015.
Linda Davidson/The Washington Post/Getty Images
No one at the conference critiqued the practice of injection as meticulously as a USGS hydrologist named John Ferris.
“The term ‘impermeable’ is never an absolute. All rocks are permeable
to some degree,” Ferris told the symposium. Wastewater would inevitably
escape the injection zone, he continued, and “engulf everything in its
inexorable migration toward the discharge boundaries of the flow
system,” such as a water well, a spring, or an old oil or gas well.
While the advancing front of waste might initially cause wells and
springs to surge with freshwater, the contamination “would become
apparent at ever-increasing distances from the injection site,” he
concluded.
“Where will the waste reside 100 years from now?” asked Orlo Childs, a
Texas petroleum geologist, in his closing remarks. “We may just be
opening up a Pandora’s box.”
“It is clear,” said Theodore Cook of the American Association of
Petroleum Geologists, in his forward to a roundup of the symposium’s
presentations in 1972, “that this method is not the final answer to
society’s waste problems.”
‘Industry Attacked the Rules’
Initially, at least, the EPA seemed to heed these warnings. In a 1974 policy proposal,
the agency echoed David Dominick’s concerns, stating in an internal
memo that they considered “waste disposal by [deep] well injection to be
a temporary means of disposal” until “a more environmentally acceptable
means of disposal” became available.
In June 1980, the EPA began regulating injection wells under the
Underground Injection Control (UIC) program. While this meant there
would be federal oversight, the rules transformed a disposal technique
once critiqued by the agency and with questionable scientific merits,
into one that was now enabled by the country’s top environmental
regulator. Immediately the EPA faced multiple lawsuits by industries,
including oil and gas, mining, and steel, which complained underground
waste injection regulations would cost them billions.
“Industry attacked the rules on the grounds that they were too complex
and too costly,” observed a 1981 Oil & Gas Journal article.
The resulting settlement did away with some of the testing requirements
related to injection wells, and reduced the number and frequency of the
reports that industry must file. Industry also made a concerted and
largely successful effort to wrest regulatory control of injection wells
from the EPA and give it to states. The EPA has since given 33 states
permission to regulate injection wells themselves, including Ohio,
Texas, and Oklahoma.
“I think at best they had a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to the
capacity of these formations to take this waste, at worst it was just a
rubber stamp,” says Ted Auch, a researcher with the oil and gas watchdog
Fieldnotes who has spent over a decade investigating the extent and
impact of oil and gas industry waste production.
The 1980s nonetheless saw some critical government injection well
research, despite eight years of generally pro-industry and
anti-environmental protection policies under President Ronald Reagan.
A 1987 report from the EPA’s Kerr Environmental Research Lab in Ada,
Oklahoma, found that “hazardous wastes are complex mixtures of
materials” and “subsurface environments often take many years to reach
chemical and biological equilibrium.” This made it “difficult to predict
exactly the action or fate of wastes after their injection,” if not
“nearly impossible.”
Another 1987 report, prepared jointly by the EPA and the Department of
Energy and published by the National Institute for Petroleum and Energy
Research, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, warned of several ways waste might
escape the rock layer it had been injected into and move through the
earth to contaminate groundwater, which is typically held in rock
formations much closer to the surface. Waste, the report stated, could
fracture rocks deep in the earth, “whereby a communication channel
allows the injected waste to migrate to a fresh water aquifer.” The
injection well itself could corrode, enabling “waste to escape and
migrate.” Further, older oil and gas wells could provide “an escape
route whereby the waste can enter an overlying potable ground water
aquifer.”
Since the early 2000s, when new technologies spurred the fracking boom,
drillers have been able to tap into once-inaccessible rock formations
for oil and gas, often located close to communities — and sometimes, as
in the Denver-Julesburg formation in Colorado, or the Marcellus and
Utica Shale formations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, right in the middle of
them. In addition to the flood of wastewater that these wells create,
with elevated levels of naturally-occurring salts, carcinogens, metals,
and radioactivity, there’s a second waste stream unique to fracking:
flowback, the toxic regurgitation of sand and chemicals shot down a well
in the fracking process.
These fracking chemicals are specifically designed to generate cracks
in rock, and to lubricate and fracture formations, in order to get at
the oil or gas they hold. It’s entirely unknown how these chemicals
react, and interact, in the high pressure, high temperature subterranean
environment of the injection zone, says Anthony Ingraffea, an
engineering professor emeritus at Cornell University who has spent his
career studying the oilfield.
This ever-growing tsunami of oil and gas wastewater has to go
somewhere, and most of it will continue to go to injection wells. “One
might be tempted to believe that well construction designs, materials,
and techniques on wells constructed decades ago were vastly different
than those of today,” says Ingraffea. “This is false.”
America’s top environmental regulator vigorously defends reliance on injection wells, stating on its website that they have “prove[n] to be a safe and inexpensive option for the disposal of unwanted and often hazardous byproducts.”
In response to questions about the agency’s historic concerns about the
long-term use of injection wells, EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch
says that the agency “is committed to supporting American energy
companies and industry that are seeking permits for underground
injection of fluids associated with oil and natural gas production,” in
order to “[advance] progress on pillars of its Powering the Great
American Comeback initiative.”
Early Warnings Realized
After 90 years of using injection wells to bury wastewater, including the past 13 years
as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas, the United States has a
profound pollution crisis. The oil and gas industry and its regulators
are facing a long-stalled reckoning on injection wells in both the
courts, and the court of public opinion.
In May 2022, a rural Ohio oil and gas operator named Bob Lane filed a
lawsuit in the Washington County Court of Common Pleas against area
injection well operators, alleging that these companies “infiltrated,
flooded, contaminated, polluted” his oil and gas wells and property with
waste containing hazardous materials “known or reasonably anticipated
to be human carcinogens,” and “harming the commercial viability” of his
“oil and gas reservoirs.” Defendants in the case include Tallgrass
Operations, a Colorado-based energy infrastructure company, and DeepRock
Disposal Solutions, a company formerly owned by Ohio state senator Brian Chavez, who chairs the Ohio Senate Energy Committee. The case is now before the Ohio Supreme Court and being followed closely by regional attorneys.
“We want to respect the process of the ongoing litigation, so we will
not comment on it at this time,” says Tallgrass spokesperson John
Brown.
Brown says his company adheres to Ohio Department of Natural Resources
(ODNR) rules and that its injected wastewater is contained within its
permitted injection zone and does not impact drinking water. “It’s
important to note that underground injection is a long-established and
proven method of disposal for many U.S. industries,” says Brown, “and
that it plays an essential role in supporting the low-cost, reliable
energy systems that are critical to millions of Ohio families and
communities across the country.”
DeepRock has not replied to questions.
ODNR spokesperson Karina Cheung says the agency has suspended
operations at six injection wells that present “an imminent danger to
the health and safety of the public and is likely to result in immediate
substantial damage to the natural resources of the state.” A 2023 ODNR
report called this leakage “potentially catastrophic” and warned of
“extensive environmental damage and/or aquifer contamination,” admitting
that Ohio’s long history of oil and gas drilling has left “numerous
penetrations that may serve as pathways for fluid to migrate.” In
November, Buckeye Environmental Network, an Ohio advocacy group, filed a lawsuit
in Ohio’s Tenth District Court of Appeals against ODNR for permitting a
pair of injection wells operated by DeepRock that would be within two
miles of a zone meant to protect the source of drinking water for
Marietta, Washington County’s largest city.
“I can think of nothing more important than to protect the city’s
water,” says Marietta City Council President Susan Vessels. “There is no
just looking the other way, I want to help our city avoid an
environmental catastrophe, which I believe is eventually going to happen
if we continue down this path.” In October, the council passed a
resolution urging Ohio state legislators to introduce legislation
imposing a three-year moratorium on new injection wells in Washington
County.
An injection well pumps wastewater into the ground in Coyle, Oklahoma, on Jan. 24, 2016.
J Pat Carter/Getty Images
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a stunning expose
co-published in October by ProPublica and the Oklahoma-based newsroom
Frontier documented a “growing number of purges,” where oil field
wastewater has been injected at “excessively high pressure” and cracked
rock deep underground, freeing it to travel uncontrolled for miles,
sometimes returning to the surface via abandoned wells. In one instance,
a spew of brine from a defunct well contaminated a watering hole for
livestock, killing at least 28 cows.
The story features Danny Ray, a whistle-blowing former state regulator
and long-time petroleum engineer, who is worried that given Oklahoma’s
vast number of unplugged oil and gas wells, the state is ripe for more
of these sorts of disasters. However, the Oklahoma Corporation
Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, discounted Ray’s
concerns, saying in a statement that it remains “committed to protecting
Oklahoma and supporting the state’s largest industry to perform its
role in a safe and economic manner.”
“These goals are not mutually exclusive,” according to the agency.
In West Texas, Bloomberg
reported in September, a growing number of the state’s over 2,000
defunct oil and gas wells — locals call them “zombie wells” — are
spouting unpredictable geysers of fracking waste. One blowout in Crane
County shot wastewater
100 feet high into the air in 2022, releasing around 24 million gallons
of toxic fluids before it was capped about two weeks later.
A spokesperson with the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil
and gas regulator, told Bloomberg that it had instituted a set of
protective new rules regarding oil and gas wastewater injection wells,
but recognized “the physical limitations of the disposal reservoirs” as
well as the risks to oil production and fresh water.
Just last month, Inside Climate News reported on a new lawsuit filed by a Crane County landowner claiming “catastrophic impacts” from injection well blowouts.
The impacts of injection well leakage and blowouts have become visible
from space. In a 2024 study using satellite observations, published in
the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of Southern Methodist University scientists
found that so much wastewater has been injected underground that it has
raised land in one area of the Permian Basin by 16 inches in just two
years, and created a high-pressurized underground lake that will lead to
more sky-high wastewater gushers. “We have established a significant
link between wastewater injection and oil well blowouts in the Permian
Basin,” the authors wrote.
Once “a little cottage industry of mom and pops,” injection wells have
become “a much bigger business,” says Kurt Knewitz, a consultant who
runs an injection well information site called BuySWD.com. A case in point, says Knewitz, is Pilot Water Solutions,
which operates injection wells in Texas and is a division of Berkshire
Hathaway Inc.’s Pilot Travel Centers, the multinational energy and
logistics company owned by Warren Buffet.
“You look at the Permian Basin and you think it’s a huge oil play, but
it produces three to four times as much produced water as oil,” says
Knewitz. “So the Permian is really a produced water play that on the
side produces some oil and gas.”
Still, the industry has not acknowledged the toxic reality on the
ground, and continues to defend its favorite waste disposal practice. A
recent report from the American Petroleum Institute (API), the nation’s
largest oil and gas lobby, states that injection wells are “safe and
environmentally reliable” and “serve a vital role by supporting the
responsible and sustainable development of O&G resources.”
The API did not respond to specific questions regarding the merits of
early critiques of injection wells, or whether they remain valid today.
“Our industry is committed to the responsible management of produced
water,” spokesperson Charlotte Law said in the group’s response.
“Operators continuously invest in advanced treatment technologies,
recycling, and reuse practices to minimize freshwater use, protect
ecosystems, and ensure safe operations.”
The USGS and DOE did not respond to questions for this story.
Trending Stories
Advocacy groups that have spent decades tracking the EPA’s oil and gas
waste rules point out that the U.S. fracking industry’s business model
depends on operators being able to get rid of waste cheaply.
“The inadequate regulation and enforcement of waste disposal wells
across the country represents a financial giveaway to the oil and gas
industry,” says the NRDC’s Mall, with NRDC. “Experts have known for
generations this method threatens the environment.”
