ICE stops publishing locations of detainees it intends to deport
The inability to locate people facilitates deportations, because it prevents appeals against deportation orders, leaving detainees with no way to defend themselves
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stopped publicly disclosing where it holds thousands of detainees subject to final orders of deportation. The unannounced move has made it much harder for lawyers and family members to locate them, the AP reported, citing current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
According to the report, ICE removed detainees from the locator on its website on September 15 without issuing prior notice. The inability to locate people makes deportations easier because it prevents appeals of removal orders, leaving detainees unable to defend themselves.
“Last week, lawyers began receiving messages from families of detained people saying they no longer appeared on the public site. Lawyers then searched for their clients who had deportation hearings scheduled and confirmed the information was true,” said attorney Annalise Araujo, a member of the ICE committee at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). The association alerted its members last Friday about what was happening.
Araujo said the wife of one of her clients told her over the weekend that her husband, who had been detained in Florida, had disappeared. He was eventually found at a center in Louisiana after he managed to call her. In many cases that does not happen and the detainee remains missing while awaiting deportation. Not being able to locate detainees speeds up deportation because lawyers do not have time to file appeals.
Even with a final deportation order against them, detainees can file a habeas corpus petition and be released on bond. Araujo, however, said the administration could transfer detainees to states where the federal appeals courts do not allow release on bond, such as Louisiana. “I believe the goal is that, if people have deportation orders — whether they are orders that have been reopened or those that are already final — and they fall under the jurisdiction of one of those circuits, they will no longer be eligible for certain benefits. Therefore, the consequences are very serious,” she warns.
The lack of information about detainees’ locations has been a recurring practice since the administration of Donald Trump stepped up deportation efforts. Family members of detainees would often go days without knowing where their relatives were, and in some cases would not find out their location until after they had been deported. However, ICE has maintained the online locator on its website since 2010, and if the immigrant identification number (Alien number) was known they could be located. The difficulty was that family members usually do not know that number.
The removal of names from the locator does not apply to detainees held at a detention center in Adelanto, California, nor to temporary holding sites in Minneapolis, New York, or the Chicago suburbs, sources told the AP. Several court rulings have forced ICE to include detainees held at those facilities in the online locator immediately upon arrival.
The Trump administration has stepped up arrests in recent months. August was the third consecutive month with a record number of arrests. Last month, ICE detained nearly 51,000 people.
According to Deportation Data Project figures from the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA, in July there were nearly 16,000 people with final orders of deportation out of 65,000 detained in ICE facilities.
Despite having final deportation orders, detainees have the right to fight their cases because there is a likelihood they could be tortured or persecuted if returned to their countries of origin. In those cases, the Trump administration is often deporting them to third countries with which they have no ties, most of them in Africa. Last week, a judge ruled that the administration must inform detainees of the country to which they will be deported and allow them to state whether they fear persecution at their destination. Their disappearance from ICE’s system will now make appeals nearly impossible.
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