FBI Warns of Leftist Honeytraps Targeting ICE Agents
Left 50%
Center 0%
Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
In February, the FBI’s Chicago field office distributed a memo to law enforcement agencies warning that a small group of women had created fake online dating profiles in January that used a “traditional wife” aesthetic and listed specific interests to appeal to immigration officers and other law enforcement. The memo said the objective was to lure officers into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, then publicly expose and dox them in order to generate public embarrassment and deter immigration enforcement. Property of the People, a government-transparency nonprofit, obtained the memo through a state open records request; The Guardian first reported it, and the FBI confirmed its authenticity to NBC News. The memo did not state where the profiles were created or include examples of their contents. The FBI declined to comment on the specific intelligence product but said it regularly shares information with law enforcement partners to help protect officers performing their duties.
Sourcing check · Fully on the record · 2 articles
2 of 2 articles cite a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report. Most articles credit The Guardian rather than reporting it themselves.
What these terms mean and how they're counted
- On the record · names a source 2 of 2
- On the record means the article cites a source by name for the story's main claim: a person, or an institution speaking officially, such as a company statement or a named agency's spokesperson. The opposite is an unnamed source. The count is how many of the counted articles cite at least one such source; the names are everyone named across them, each once however the articles spell it. Here: FBI
- Primary evidence · cites a document or data 2 of 2
- Primary evidence means the article cites a record you could check yourself: a court filing or ruling, a dataset or report, a recording or transcript, an official statement or press release, market data. A quote is not a document. The count is how many articles cite one. Here: FBI memo, internal memo, open records request
- Credits another outlet 1 of 2
- The article says the story comes from another outlet's reporting (“first reported by Reuters”). Those articles relay the story; they are not independent confirmation. Here: The Guardian
- Unnamed sources 0 of 2
- The main claim is attributed to people who are not identified: “people familiar with the matter”, “officials said”. The count is how many articles do this.
- How it developed
- When the first report landed and whether it named anyone; when the first named source and the first document appeared. Here: First report Sep 18, 17:39 UTC by Breitbart, naming its source. First document in the first report, from Breitbart (FBI memo).
- Not counted 0
- Opinion, analysis and video pieces, and articles too short to assess. Every count above is out of the counted articles. An article republished under a new headline is one article.
This is about who is cited, not whether the story is true. Each source below says what it names. How we count
Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
A reader of left-leaning coverage cannot tell whether the FBI was warning about a documented campaign or an unsourced rumor. Left-leaning coverage at NBC News grounds the story in an internal Chicago memo about women using a traditional wife aesthetic to lure immigration officers and then dox them, and notes the memo shared no examples. Right-leaning coverage is more complete on that point. At Breitbart, the memo sits next to TikTok users who said they were already going on dates and running background checks to expose ICE agents. Those posts included open requests to collect officers' photos from dating apps.
The two sides do not name the tactic the same way, so the same memo sounds like catfishing in one telling and like sexual entrapment in the other. Left-leaning coverage calls the accounts "fake tradwife dating profiles." Right-leaning coverage calls the same conduct "honeytraps."
Did the FBI confirm that any officer was actually lured into a meeting, or did the warning rest on profiles and viral posts alone?
Bottom line
NBC News told the FBI's fake-profile warning without the TikTok women who claimed they were already dating ICE agents to dox them.
The receipts — 4 facts one side's coverage lacks
- A TikTok user said she was part of a group of about 20 women from Massachusetts doing this
- The FBI memo did not state where the dating profiles were created or share examples of what they contained
- The FBI confirmed the memo's authenticity and said it regularly shares information to protect officers
- The memo went out amid Operation Metro Surge, ramped down after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
The Left View
NBC News places the warning amid “Operation Metro Surge,” a federal deployment of thousands of immigration officers to the Twin Cities that was later ramped down after the January fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were protesting immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, and several months after Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz”—events it says prompted nationwide protests and “national furor against federal law enforcement.” That account also flags the memo’s omissions of locations and sample profiles. The executive director of Property of the People called it “absurd the FBI issued a thinly-sourced security alert about ICE agents’ online dating troubles” and “equally ludicrous the FBI is spending taxpayer dollars to protect ICE agents from possible ‘embarrassment’ at the hands of a supposed ‘small group of women’ who might name and ridicule them online.” A former FBI agent quoted in The Guardian said “the right-wing echo chamber creates threats, and the government’s intelligence apparatus just repeats those threats without any context, more detail, or any instruction of how agents or officers should respond,” adding, “They must have run out of other threats.”
The Right View
Breitbart’s John Nolte frames the memo as an FBI warning about “left-wing women using dating sites with the specific goal of luring ICE agents into a honey trap,” and treats left-media doubt that “this threat is real” as “just as troubling as the honey traps.” He argues the notice followed a January New York Post report on “Lefty TikTokkers” organizing women to chase “d–k pics” and “selfies” of ICE agents “in a twisted scheme to dox them, as attacks on immigration officers surge to historic levels.” He quotes TikTok user pretty lilthang saying she was “part of a group of about 20 or so women from MA doing this” with “a private FB group of around 1K ppl, some of us go on dates & others help on the back end w/background checks, finding info, etc.,” and user healthypolicyprincess urging people to screenshot suspected ICE profiles and “Get those dick pics and selfies and share them widely!” Nolte compares the alert to colleagues warning one another about phishing emails and calls failure to warn “a dereliction of duty.” He describes the women as “empty-souled” for targeting men whose “only sin is risking [their] own life” to arrest and deport violent criminals, and as writing themselves “as the heroes for protecting evil at the expense of the innocent.”
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is that the FBI circular was, in Property of the People’s words, a “thinly-sourced security alert” about possible “embarrassment” rather than violence, issued without locations or sample profiles during a politically explosive immigration crackdown. The right’s strongest argument is that the conduct was not hypothetical: the TikTok posts Nolte cites have women claiming an organized dating-and-doxxing operation against ICE agents, which tracks the memo’s stated tactic, so treating the warning as an invented “right-wing echo chamber” threat ignores open-source evidence. The central unresolved tension is whether those posts and the Chicago memo describe the same effort—and whether non-violent honeytrap doxxing of immigration officers is a legitimate officer-safety intelligence matter or a small-scale humiliation campaign the bureau should not have elevated into a formal warning.
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