ICE removed thousands of detainees with final deportation orders from its public locator

On Sept. 15, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped listing the locations of detainees with final removal orders in its online detainee locator, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Lawyers confirmed this week that clients had vanished from the system without explanation, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members on Friday.

ICE did not announce the change. In a statement to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it, saying only that detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation.

The locator, launched in 2010, let relatives, lawyers, and the public search for people in custody. Now a specific category of detainee — those whose immigration cases have reached a final order of removal — is excluded from it. Nearly 16,000 people booked into ICE detention in July carried final removal orders, more than a third of all bookings that month, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA. ICE held more than 65,000 people as of early July. Around 30 percent likely had final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.

The exclusion does not apply to detainees held at a facility in Adelanto, California, or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City, and suburban Chicago, where judges have ordered ICE to list detainees promptly as part of ongoing litigation.

For families and attorneys, the disappearance from the system is immediate and disorienting. Detainees are frequently moved between facilities before deportation. "Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don't know where the person might be," said Greg Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He said the change interferes with the attorney-client relationship and the ability to contact clients.

The Department of Homeland Security has argued that people with final removal orders have received due process — typically meaning an immigration judge ordered removal after a hearing, and the decision was affirmed or not appealed. But Mendez said more people have been receiving final orders after failing to appear at hearings, because the administration's immigration courts have taken steps to make participation and reopening cases harder.

Detainees with final orders still have legal options, including seeking to reopen a case or filing a habeas petition asking a judge to order release on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of such rulings. Some detainees with final orders also hold legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood of torture or persecution. Lawyers say many of these people now face removal to third-party countries where they have no ties, and that being untraceable in ICE's system makes legal challenges harder to mount.

Atenas Burrola Estrada of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights said every one of the center's clients with a final order — 17 as of Monday — had disappeared from the locator. Among them are eight Somali men detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, according to their attorney, My Khanh Ngo of the ACLU. "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," Ngo said.

Several immigration lawyers said the exclusion of an entire category of detainee from the locator has no apparent parallel in the system's history. Mendez called it "another iteration of disappearing people."