The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. When a person is arrested and detained by the U.S. government, it should be possible to find out where that person is being held. For generations, that was true for people held in immigration detention centers — until last week, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rolled out a startling new policy.
Beginning September 15, people held at ICE detention centers who are subject to final orders of removal (even if they are appealing that order or have some other legal basis to remain in the country) will no longer be listed in the Online Detainee Locator System; and according to the Washington Post, ICE staff have been instructed to refuse to provide the location of those people to attorneys and family.
The online detainee locator system was first put in place during the Obama administration, and allows anyone to enter a person’s name and country of birth and find out where that person is being detained by ICE. Before the system went into place, families and attorneys would have to call the local ICE office and ask for the person’s location. But at no point in the past were officials ever ordered to deliberately withhold detainees’ locations.
The impact of ICE’s decision to hide the location of tens of thousands of detainees from public view each month is exacerbated by the fact that ICE’s detention system has exploded in size under President Trump. In his first 10 months back in office, the number of detention centers used by ICE increased by 91%. As the detention system quickly expanded, rapid transfers became far more common, with more than 1 in 10 people now being transferred out of state within 24 hours of arrest.
ICE’s new policy specifically targets people with final orders of removal. Those people enter ICE detention in a couple of different ways. Some people are detained by ICE before they have been ordered removed and go through the removal process while in detention. These people are now disappearing from the detainee locator system the moment their removal order becomes final, even if their physical location has not yet changed.
Other people who are taken into custody already have final orders of removal and have been targeted by ICE to execute the order of removal and carry out a deportation. In total, there are at least 1.4 million people living in the U.S. who have final orders of removal. Many people in this situation were ordered removed in the past for missing a court hearing (often unintentionally). After this latest policy change, these individuals will never show up on the ICE detainee locator system once arrested.
Knowing where a person is being detained is very important to people on the outside trying to get in contact. Each detention center has its own visitation rules and processes, and there is no centralized visitation and contact system. Without knowing where a loved one is held, family members would have no choice but to wait until the person being detained finds a way to contact them from the inside. But that may not even be possible — for decades, ICE has made it incredibly difficult for people to have phone access in detention.
This delay — or difficulty in contacting that outside world altogether — may significantly impair the ability to hire lawyers, or for a person’s existing lawyer to get in contact and gather evidence as part of their defense. Legal visitations often have to be scheduled in advance, so any additional time spent tracking someone down furthers delay. And for those individuals arrested who already have a final order of removal, even a delay of hours may mean the difference between a deportation and a successful legal intervention. These concerns are particularly heightened given that illegal deportations have dramatically increased under President Trump, with at least 170 deportations in violation of court orders occurring since January 2025.
The location of an individual may also be important to journalists following an individual person’s journey through the detention system, or to track a high-profile case. Similarly, elected officials looking to locate a constituent who has been arrested may now struggle to find the person.
Importantly, not every person with a final order of removal will be rapidly deported. Some people are appealing their removal orders in federal circuit courts and have been granted stays of their removal. Others have won humanitarian protections such as withholding of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture and remain in custody while the government appeals or seeks a third country of removal. In addition, because there are often bureaucratic obstacles to deportation, some individuals who have stopped fighting their removal may nevertheless languish in ICE detention centers for weeks or months. The location of all these people will now be hidden from public view.
While ICE has not given any reason as to why it made this change (or indeed confirmed the policy’s existence), the most likely explanation is that the agency is trying to interfere with legal access for people on the threshold of deportation. Since President Trump took office and ICE began its enforcement blitz, there has been an explosion of habeas corpus lawsuits designed to temporarily halt deportations and secure release from ICE detention. This new policy may be designed to make that more difficult, as a habeas lawsuit must generally be filed in the court which has jurisdiction over where a person is being detained.
By hiding people’s locations from their lawyers, ICE may be seeking to make it more difficult for lawyers to know where to file a habeas. However, it’s not clear whether this will work, as there is an “unknown custodian” exception to this rule, which the Supreme Court explained in 2004 applies in a situation where a person is “held in an undisclosed location by an unknown custodian.” This means that lawyers may still be able to file habeas lawsuits even if unable to determine where their client is located; although there may be additional delay if the government objects to the venue and seeks to transfer the case.
As a result, while this policy may well increase deportations somewhat by delaying access to people on the brink of removal, its most significant impact may be to increase the panic and fear that families face when their loved one is arrested. That the U.S. government is deliberately inflicting this horror on family members of those it targets, many of whom are U.S. citizens, is a scandal in and of itself. And while legal challenges are expected to this new policy, so long as it remains in effect, the harms will continue to mount.
