Without any announcement, ICE erased thousands of people facing final removal from the database that families and lawyers use to find them, a change attorneys say could make eleventh-hour appeals nearly impossible.
Immigration lawyers around the country spent last week typing familiar names into a familiar government website and getting nothing back.
The names belonged to their clients, people held in immigration detention, some of them scheduled for deportation within days. For sixteen years, ICE’s Online Detainee Locator has answered a simple question for families and attorneys: where is this person being held? As of Sept. 15, it no longer does for thousands of detainees, according to The Latin Times.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly pulled people with final orders of removal from the locator that day and told its officers to stop confirming those detainees’ whereabouts over the phone, according to The Associated Press and The Washington Post, which reported the change together. Three current and former ICE officials described it to the AP on condition of anonymity; the agency made no announcement, and the site itself showed no notice, The Latin Times reported.
The number of people this can touch is not small.
Nearly 16,000 of those booked into ICE custody in July were under final removal orders, more than a third of all bookings that month, according to figures the Deportation Data Project, a research effort at the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA, drew from ICE’s own records and shared with the AP. In early July, more than 65,000 people were in ICE detention overall.
Asked directly about the change, ICE neither confirmed nor denied it. In a statement to the AP cited by The Latin Times, the agency said it is concentrating on deporting people who already have final orders and blamed what it called a historic wave of court injunctions holding up individual removals. Detainees, it added, still have access to phones. The Department of Homeland Security has made a broader argument in recent weeks: that people with final orders have already had their day in court. What that argument leaves out is that a final order is often not the end of the road.
A person ordered removed can still ask a judge to reopen the case, file an appeal, or bring a habeas corpus petition challenging the detention itself. Some cannot legally be sent back to countries where they would face persecution or torture, and are fighting over where they will be deported, not whether. All of that becomes far harder when no one can say where the person is. Habeas petitions, in particular, generally have to be filed in the federal district where a detainee is physically held, and ICE moves people between facilities constantly, sometimes across the country.
That is the practical danger lawyers keep returning to.
My Khanh Ngo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, put it plainly to the AP: if you cannot find your client, you cannot give a court the information it needs to halt a deportation. She represents eight Somali men who disappeared from the locator after being moved to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, roughly 1,500 miles from where their cases began, and said the change could make challenging some removals “nearly impossible.”
The disappearances are already documented. Lawyers at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights ran 17 of their clients through the locator one day in mid-September and found every one of them gone, the group told the Post; each of the 17, the AP reported, had a final removal order.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association alerted its members, and its government-relations director, Greg Chen, called the move “deeply troubling,” warning it could push deportations through faster than anyone can contest them.
In a handful of places, an ICE facility in Adelanto, California, and temporary holding sites in Minneapolis, New York City and suburban Chicago, detainees are still listed because judges in active lawsuits have ordered ICE to keep that information public. Where the courts compel disclosure, the names remain. Where they do not, the listings have gone dark. The pattern points to a decision, not a glitch.
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SOurce: The Latin Times
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