The owner of a white supremacist account on X has reportedly been unmasked as a Dallas-area prosecutor who represents Immigrations and Customs Enforcement at court.
James “Jim” Joseph Rodden, 44, an assistant chief counsel for ICE who represents the agency in immigration hearings in the Dallas area, appears to be behind the account, which regularly shares racist and anti-immigrant takes, the Texas Observer reported.
“America is a White nation founded by Whites,” the account GlomarResponder wrote to its 17,000 followers last month.
“All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb f—,” said a post from September.
In other posts, GlomarResponder described himself as a “fascist” and said the freedom of association had been abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The newspaper confirmed his identity by comparing information shared by the account with federal court records and other public records, information from private data broker sites, open-source investigation tools, other social media profiles and interviews, and courtroom hearings.
“’Migrants’ are all criminals,” he wrote in August. “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders. Yet,” he added.
Rodden did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
He also didn’t respond to multiple requests from the Observer for comment. When journalists approached him in a public hallway outside the Dallas immigration court and asked if he’d received the interview requests, he said to “call [his] press office.”
But in between the racist and xenophobic posts, the GlomarResponder has regularly shared information about ICE raids and arrest warrants, suggesting its owner was someone within the agency.
Incredibly, during their investigation, the Observer’s journalists watched Rodden scrolling through the X app on his phone during a court hearing. He then began drafting a post using a profile photo that resembled GlomarResponder’s. A minute later, a new post appeared on GlomarResponder’s profile.
As of Thursday, the account was still up, but its posts had been made private. The Observer, however, archived all the posts cited in its article before the account was locked, the piece’s author Steven Monacelli wrote on X. Users on the platform reported that when they wrote “Hey James” to GlomarResponder, they were blocked.
In his article, Monacelli wrote that an “overwhelming number” of biographical details linked Rodden and GlomarResponder.
Records show Rodden previously lived in Pennsylvania, Northern Virginia and North Carolina. He attended Penn State and Wake Forest University—as did GlomarResponder—and appears to have gotten his law license in Washington, D.C., which would allow him to represent ICE in Texas courts.
Before joining ICE, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he obtained the rank of corporal, and worked as a U.S Border Patrol agent—roles that GlomarResponder has described at length. During law school, he worked for a federal public defender’s office in North Carolina.
His court appearances lined up with posts from GlomarResponder saying he was at the courthouse waiting for warrants, and his physical appearance—including his suit, watch, height and shaved head—matched descriptions Glomar had shared of himself.
Social media posts from Rodden’s wife were also consistent with visual and textual clues from GlomarResponder. And in September 2023, GlomarResponder revealed he was party to a lawsuit challenging the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal employees. James Joseph Rodden was the lead plaintiff in a similar 2021 class action suit, which was vacated in December.
Reached by the Observer, an ICE spokesperson declined to comment on the article’s claims “pending further investigation, to include whether the owner of the referenced ‘X’ account is a current employee.
“Notwithstanding, ICE holds its employees to the highest standards of professionalism and takes seriously all allegations of inappropriate conduct.”
