32 Lawmakers Demand Federal Watchdog Investigate ICE’s Broken Detainee Tracking System

A bipartisan group of 32 members of Congress asked the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General on Tuesday to look into ongoing problems with the federal system meant to help families find people in immigration detention. They said these failures have let Immigration and Customs Enforcement make detainees vanish within the United States.

Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, along with Representatives Veronica Escobar of Texas and Lauren Underwood of Illinois, led the effort in a formal letter sent to the DHS Office of Inspector General on April 7.

“Without a functional locator system, DHS is effectively creating ‘disappearances’ on U.S. soil,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter focuses on the ICE Online Detainee Locator System, a public database meant to show families, attorneys, and advocates where a detained person is being held. ICE policy requires the agency to update the system within 8 hours after someone arrives at a detention facility. However, lawmakers say this rule has often not been followed since January 2025, and some people have gone days or weeks without being listed in the system.

In some cases, detainees were deported from the United States before their location was ever added to the database.

One case mentioned in the lawmakers’ letter is about Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College in Massachusetts. She was detained at Boston Logan International Airport in November 2025 while trying to fly home to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. Her lawyers later filed court documents claiming the government acted in bad faith by not answering calls to the Boston-area ICE office, not updating the detainee locator database, and moving her without letting her contact her parents or lawyer.

Her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, said the ICE database showed Lopez Belloza was in Massachusetts on the day she was arrested, but had no information about her location the next day. “We literally have to guess not only where our client is but why they’re being held, because they don’t give us any information,” Pomerleau said.

Lopez Belloza was sent to Honduras two days after her arrest, even though a court order told the government to keep her in the United States for at least 72 hours. The Trump administration later apologized in court, admitting that an ICE deportation officer did not activate an alert system that should have flagged her case for review. Her case was dismissed in March 2026 after she refused to board an ICE-arranged return flight. Her lawyers said the flight was a trap that would have led to her being detained and deported again.

The lawmakers’ letter comes as the immigration detention system has grown faster than almost any time in recent history. ICE is now detaining over 75 percent more people than last year, with a record 73,000 in custody as of mid-January 2026. Advocates say 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention and that conditions have only gotten worse in 2026.

The press release says there are now more than 70,000 people in ICE custody, which is 80 percent more than in December 2024. This high number of arrests, along with frequent transfers between facilities, has made it much harder to track detainees in real time.

The lawmakers also pointed out what some legal experts call a deliberate pattern. Reports show that in some cases, detainees were moved across state lines to take them away from areas with stronger legal protections or more favorable judges. The lawmakers noted that one ICE agent told a detainee she was being moved from California to Indiana because of California’s laws.

The letter also lists other places where detainees are being held outside of traditional facilities. These include military bases, state-run facilities, ICE field offices, and warehouses that were originally built to store consumer goods.

The lawmakers asked the Inspector General to fully review the ODLS system. They want to know why its accuracy has dropped since January 2025, what types of information ICE is not adding to the database, how location updates are managed, and how these issues affect detainees’ legal rights.

Attorneys told the lawmakers that the system’s failures have made it harder to file habeas petitions, meet deadlines, and attend court hearings. The letter says some families found their detained relatives only after they had already been deported.

“When individuals in DHS custody cannot be located, their legal representation suffers,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter was co-signed by eleven senators, including Ed Markey and Angela Alsobrooks, and twenty-one House members, including Massachusetts Representatives Stephen Lynch, Seth Moulton, and Lori Trahan.

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sources: Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren; WBUR News; GBH News; American Immigration Council; CNN; ABC News

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