Report says ICE quietly removed thousands of detainees from its locator system. Lawyers say their clients have simply ‘disappeared’

Immigration and Customs Enforcement no longer lists the whereabouts of thousands of people in its custody who already carry final deportation orders, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. Those names came off the agency’s public online detainee locator on Sept. 15, three current and former ICE officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change.

Lawyers who spoke with The Associated Press said clients they represent dropped out of the system this week. The American Immigration Lawyers Association alerted its members to the development on Friday.

Officials described the step as a clear break from how the agency had handled the locator in the past. Relatives and attorneys now find it far harder to locate those detainees, the officials indicated, and last-minute court filings before removal may become more difficult.

Lawyers report clients vanished from ICE locator after Sept. 15 change

The shift covers people who have already received a final order of removal from an immigration court, sources said. The agency’s approach to managing detainee information reflects its broader data practices, such as when ICE was ordered to delete Medicaid data on millions of people but reportedly sent it to Palantir instead. 

Immigration lawyers said the change could make last-minute legal challenges harder to mount. ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA show that nearly 16,000 people booked into ICE detention in July already had final removal orders, more than a third of that month’s bookings.

Sources said the practice does not cover people held at a detention site in Adelanto, California, or at temporary holding locations in Minneapolis, New York City, or suburban Chicago. Judges have directed ICE to enter detainees at those sites into the online locator soon after arrival as part of litigation over detention practices.

ICE did not announce the change publicly. A statement the agency sent to the AP neither confirmed nor denied the report. The statement said the agency is prioritizing people with final removal orders for deportation while facing a “historic number of injunctions” from courts that halt individual removals.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said lawyers and family members suddenly lost contact with clients and relatives and received no explanation. He noted that detainees are often transferred to other facilities before they are deported. 

“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 has maintained that people subject to final removal orders have already received due process. That typically means an immigration judge ordered removal after a hearing, including cases in which the immigrant did not appear, and the ruling was either upheld on appeal or left unappealed.

Detainees in that category still have legal avenues available, including requests to reopen a case or habeas petitions seeking release on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have issued thousands of orders requiring release or bond hearings.

ICE facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the latest available count. Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project, said around 30 percent of them likely have final removal orders. 

She said more people have received those orders after missing hearings in recent months because immigration courts have made participation and case reopenings more difficult. “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.”

Some people with final orders also hold protections against return to their countries of origin because of the risk of torture or persecution. Lawyers said many now face removal to third countries where they have no connections, and their absence from the locator will make those challenges harder to pursue.

ICE introduced the online locator in 2010 so relatives, lawyers, and the public could search for people in custody. 

Before then, people had to phone regional ICE offices or individual jails. Advocates and lawmakers have long complained that updates arrive slowly and that the database often contains inaccurate or missing entries. The system also omits minors, people held by Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and people in transit between facilities.

Several immigration lawyers said they know of no earlier parallel for dropping people with final removal orders from the list. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 people as of Monday.

My Khanh Ngo of the American Civil Liberties Union, who represents eight Somali men held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said those men are among those no longer listed. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases. “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.