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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is removing the names of its detainees who are facing final deportation orders from its public online database.
The move will disrupt detainees’ legal challenges to deportation and leave their whereabouts unknown to their lawyers and loved ones.
The agency quietly removed thousands of people from its online detainee locator on September 15, the Associated Press reports. Certain detention facilities will not be subject to the new order if judges have ruled that they are required to list detainees in their facilities.
The exact number of names removed is unclear, but judges have issued over 740,000 removal and voluntary departure orders this year, while reports have found that ICE arrested nearly 16,000 people in July who were subject to final removal orders. Experts and advocates have criticized the practice as digitally “disappearing” immigrants, saying that it’s yet another erosion of due process rights.
The agency has also issued a new policy barring immigration officials from sharing the locations of such detainees, two former Department of Homeland Security officials told The Washington Post.
This policy of hiding detainees’ locations will make it far harder or “nearly impossible” for many people to challenge their removals, legal experts said, as the agency rushes to make quotas for its mass deportation campaign.
American Civil Liberties Union Senior Staff Attorney My Khanh Ngo told AP that eight Somali men, her clients, detained at the U.S.’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp are among those whose names were removed. She said that such a move could make it “nearly impossible” to challenge many deportation cases.
“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,” said Ngo.
“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, per AP. “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.”
ICE has already faced scrutiny over its practices of quietly transferring detainees to different facilities without notification, often leaving families terrified when they find out that their loved one has been moved thousands of miles away.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has sent over 25,000 people to countries that they had no previous connection with, according to Refugees International. Under the direction of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the Trump administration transformed a former refugee bureau within the State Department into the “Office of Remigration,” which has authorized or pledged $410 million in agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America.
The news of the database deletions comes just days after an ICE agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan man, Wilber Garcés Pérez, in Austin over the weekend. ICE has reportedly transferred Garcés from a local hospital to a detention facility against doctors’ recommendations, as doctors have not removed the bullet from his body because it is too close to his spine. Despite this, a judge has ordered the 28-year-old DoorDash driver to be present for an in-person deportation hearing on September 30.
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