ICE Hides Thousands Of Detainees As Trump Expands Third-Country Deportations

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees facing final deportation orders, making it harder for lawyers and relatives to locate them as the Trump administration accelerates removals.

ICE removed the affected detainees from its online locator on September 15, according to current and former agency officials who spoke to The Associated Press. Several lawyers said their clients suddenly disappeared from the system, while the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned members about the change.

The move could make last-minute legal challenges harder, particularly because detainees are frequently transferred between facilities before deportation. People with final removal orders can still seek to reopen their cases or challenge detention through habeas petitions.

Nearly 16,000 people booked into ICE detention in July had final removal orders, representing more than one-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.

ICE did not confirm or deny the change. The agency said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritised for deportation while it faced what it called a “historic number of injunctions” blocking individual removals.

The development comes as Washington expands third-country deportations, in which migrants are sent to countries other than their countries of origin. An investigation by Forbidden Stories and international media partners found that 25,447 migrants had been deported to 35 countries by August 31, under arrangements involving about $410 million in planned US funding.

Mexico received around 20,000 of those migrants, while others were sent to countries across Latin America, Africa and the Pacific. The investigation found that 49 of Africa’s 54 countries had been approached about accepting US deportees.

The policy has faced legal challenges. On September 18, a federal appeals court rejected the administration’s policy allowing rapid deportations to third countries without giving migrants a meaningful opportunity to raise safety concerns.

Meanwhile, lawyers say disappearing detainees from the locator could leave families unable to determine whether relatives have been transferred or deported. Atenas Burrola Estrada of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights said all 17 of her clients with final removal orders had disappeared from the system.

Among them are eight Somali men held at Guantanamo Bay, according to their attorney My Khanh Ngo of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it extremely difficult to provide courts with information needed to challenge their removal.