ICE hides detainee locations as deportation drive raises due process fears

ICE has removed thousands of detainees with final removal orders from its public locator. Lawyers say the shift could speed up deportations and undermine access to due process.

In Short

• The unannounced move began on September 15, officials familiar with practice said
• Attorneys say missing records can block urgent court filings before removal
• The restriction excludes certain centres where judges mandated prompt online listing

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly showing the locations of thousands of detainees who are under final deportation orders, making it much harder for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice. The change, which was not announced publicly, marks a major shift from earlier practice.

According to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the move, the agency removed these detainees from its online locator system on September 15. Several lawyers told The Associated Press that their clients had disappeared from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation on Friday.

Lawyers said the move could speed up deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue. Nearly 16,000 people arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were under final removal orders, more than a third of total bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

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

ICE did not publicise the change and, in a statement to AP, did not confirm or deny it. The agency said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritised for deportation even as ICE faced what it called a "historic number of injunctions" from courts stopping individual removals.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the change had left families and lawyers without answers, especially because detainees are often moved to new 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," 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 under final removal orders have received due process. This usually means an immigration judge has ordered their removal after a hearing, including in cases where immigrants did not appear, and the decision was either upheld on appeal or not appealed. Even so, detainees can still challenge their detention or removal by seeking to reopen a case or filing a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering release or bond hearings.

ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people in early July, according to the latest available data. Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project, said around 30 per cent of them likely had final removal orders. She said more people had received such orders in recent months after missing hearings because the administration's immigration courts had taken steps that made it harder to take part in proceedings 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 protection against being sent back to their countries of origin because they could face torture or persecution. Lawyers said many are now facing removal to third countries where they have no ties, and their disappearance from ICE's system will make legal challenges harder.

ICE launched the online detainee locator system in 2010 so relatives, lawyers and the public could search for people in custody. Before that, they had to call ICE regional offices or individual detention centres. Advocates and lawmakers have long complained that the system is slow to update and often contains inaccurate or missing information, which can allow ICE to hide detainees' locations for days or weeks. Minors, people held by US Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees in transit are among those not listed. Several immigration lawyers said excluding detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel. Atenas Burrola Estrada, deputy programme director at 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 missing from the locator are eight Somali men held at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to My Khanh Ngo, one of their lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it "nearly impossible" in some cases to challenge removals. "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. Overall, the change has made thousands of detainees under final removal orders far harder to trace for families and lawyers at a time when the administration is stepping up deportations.

With PTI Inputs

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