The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it holds thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders. The unannounced measure has made it much harder for lawyers and families to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.
According to three current officials and former ICE employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the change, ICE removed thousands of detainees from its online locator system on September 15. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed that their clients disappeared from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation on Friday.
The change highlights the hard-line nature of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, because it greatly complicates tracking thousands of detainees and potentially prevents them from exercising all their legal options. According to immigration lawyers, the practice applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court and could accelerate deportations by making last-minute legal appeals harder to file.
Nearly 16,000 people arrested and booked into ICE detention centers in July were subject to final expulsion orders, representing more than a third of all detentions, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, based at UC Berkeley and UCLA.
According to the sources, the practice does not apply to detainees at a detention center in Adelanto, California, or at temporary detention centers in Minneapolis, New York, or the suburbs of Chicago. Judges have ordered ICE to include detainees at those facilities in the online locator immediately after their arrival, as part of litigation over its detention practices.
Hiding the location of arrestees is one more hardship for families and legal teams. It can be interpreted as a way to increase pressure on detainees to give up their appeals and accept deportation. ICE did not publicly announce the measure and, in a statement to AP, the agency neither confirmed nor denied it. The statement said priority was being given to detainees with final deportation orders, even though ICE faces a historic number of court orders blocking individual removals.
As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without any explanation, which is especially worrying because detainees are often transferred to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Families are very worried because they believe the person has been deported and they don’t know where he or she might be,” he said. “For lawyers, this has serious implications for being able to contact their clients. Without a doubt, it will affect the attorney-client relationship.”
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has argued that people subject to final deportation orders have received due process. This generally means an immigration judge ordered their deportation after a hearing, even in cases where immigrants did not appear, and that the decision was upheld on appeal or was not appealed.
Even with a final removal order, detainees have options to challenge their detention and expulsion, including reopening the case or filing a habeas corpus petition asking a judge to order their release on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have issued thousands of rulings ordering the release of detainees or hearings to set bond.
In early July, according to the most recent available data, ICE detention centers held more than 65,000 people. About 30% have final deportation orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director of the National Immigration Project. She explained that in recent months more final expulsion orders have been issued to people who did not appear at hearings, because government immigration courts have taken steps to make participation and reopening such cases more difficult.
“To me, it is simply another way of making people disappear,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It is something we would hear about in another country and worry about individual rights and due process.”
Some people with final expulsion orders also have legal protection against deportation to their countries of origin because they are likely to be tortured or persecuted. Many face expulsion to third countries with which they have no ties, and their disappearance from the ICE system will make legal challenges harder, according to the lawyers.
ICE launched the online detainee locator system in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers, and the general public to search for detained people. Previously, they had to call ICE regional offices or individual detention centers to try to locate them. Many activists and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or incomplete information, allowing ICE to hide detainees’ locations for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been in Customs and Border Protection custody for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transferred are not listed in the system, among others. However, the exclusion of detainees with final deportation orders is unprecedented, according to several immigration lawyers.
Atenas Burrola Estrada, deputy program director at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “each and every one of our clients with a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in total as of Monday. Among those missing from the locator system are eight Somali men detained at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo, Cuba, according to My Khanh Ngo, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. Ngo said the change could make it practically impossible for people to challenge their removal in some cases. “If you cannot locate your client, if you don’t know what is happening to him, you cannot get that information to the court to stop his deportation,” she said.
