ICE Removes Detainees With Final Removal Orders From Public Locator System

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly disclosing the locations of thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced change that has made it significantly harder for lawyers and relatives to find them.

The agency 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 matter. Several lawyers confirmed that their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association alerted its members on Friday.

The shift marks a departure from previous practice and underscores the hardline direction of President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement. It leaves thousands of detainees difficult to trace and potentially unable to pursue the full range of legal options available to them.

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

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

ICE did not publicize the move. In a statement, the agency neither confirmed nor denied it, saying that detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation even as ICE faces a "historic number of injunctions" from courts halting individual removals.

As a result, lawyers and relatives lost track of clients and loved ones without explanation — a particular concern because detainees are frequently transferred to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at 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, has argued that people subject to final removal orders have received due process. That typically means an immigration judge ordered their removal after a hearing — including cases where immigrants failed to appear — and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.

Still, those detainees can challenge their detention and removal, including by seeking to reopen their cases or by filing habeas petitions asking a judge to order their release on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have issued thousands of rulings ordering detainees released or granted bond hearings.

ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent data available. About 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.

More people have received final removal orders after failing to appear for hearings in recent months, she said, because the administration's immigration courts have made it harder to participate and to reopen such cases.

"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 detainees with final removal orders also have legal protections against deportation to their home countries based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many face removal to third-party countries where they have no ties, and their disappearance from ICE's system will make legal challenges harder, lawyers said.

ICE launched the online detainee locator in 2010 to let relatives, lawyers and the public search for people in custody. Previously, they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to track them down.

Advocates and lawmakers have long complained that the system updates too slowly and contains inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield detainees' locations for days or weeks. Minors, people held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees being transported are among those not listed.

But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. 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 as of Monday.

Among those no longer listed are eight Somali men detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo of the American Civil Liberties Union. 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.