ICE quietly wipes thousands of detainees from public tracking system, advocates say

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.

ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.

The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.

The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.

The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.

Immigration officials have increased pressure on detainees to accept deportation and forgo appeals, with the concealment of their locations creating another obstacle for individuals and their families under the Trump administration.

ICE did not publicize the policy shift and neither confirmed nor denied the change in a statement to the AP. The agency noted that it prioritizes detainees with final removal orders for deportation, even as it contends with a "historic number of injunctions" from courts halting individual removals.

This lack of disclosure has left lawyers and families unable to track loved ones without explanation. This is especially troubling because detainees are frequently transferred to new facilities prior to removal, said Greg Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

"Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be," he said. "On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship."

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, maintained that individuals subject to final removal orders have received complete due process. This typically means an immigration judge ordered removal following a hearing, including cases where individuals missed court, and the decision was affirmed or left unappealed.

Individuals in detention still possess legal mechanisms to challenge their custody and deportation, including requesting to reopen their cases or submitting habeas petitions asking federal judges for release on constitutional grounds. To date, federal courts have issued thousands of rulings granting bond hearings or ordering detainees released.

According to the most recent data from early July, ICE facilities housed more than 65,000 people. Approximately 30 percent of those individuals likely face final removal orders, Michelle Mendez, the legal director at the National Immigration Project, noted. Mendez explained that more people have received final removal orders in recent months after failing to appear for hearings, as immigration courts have implemented policies that make participating in proceedings or reopening cases significantly harder.

"To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people," she said. "Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process."

A portion of those with final removal orders maintain legal protections against being sent back to their home nations due to credible threats of torture or persecution. Attorneys caution that many are instead facing deportation to third-party countries where they lack any ties, adding that their disappearance within the ICE network will make subsequent legal challenges far more difficult to pursue.

Launched in 2010, ICE's online detainee locator system was created to enable relatives, attorneys, and the public to search for individuals in custody. Previously, tracking people down required making direct phone calls to individual detention facilities or ICE regional offices.

Lawmakers and advocates have long complained that the online tool updates far too slowly and contains inaccurate or missing data, effectively allowing ICE to obscure detainee locations for days or weeks. Minors, individuals being transported, and people held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for under 48 hours are among those excluded from the system.

However, immigration attorneys point out that no clear precedent exists for excluding detainees who have received final removal orders. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said 17 clients were affected as of Monday, noting that "every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,"

Those absent from the database include eight Somali men currently detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to My Khanh Ngo, an attorney representing them from the American Civil Liberties Union. Ngo warned the modification could render it "nearly impossible" for people to challenge their removals in specific instances.

"If you can't find your client, don't know what's happening to your client, you can't get that information to the court to stop their removal," she said.