ICE Wiped Thousands of People From Its Database. Families Are Paying the Price.

Por Sophie Hurwitz — Mother Jones Magazine

On September 17, immigration attorney Rachel Marandett went looking for a man held by ICE in the agency’s detainee locator. 

Searching his name returned zero results—and Marandett, an attorney with the American Friends Service Committee, began to worry he’d been deported without anyone noticing. 

“He was missing, and I panicked,” Marandett said. “I sent a frantic email.” 

Through other channels, she was eventually able to learn that he had not been sent out of the country. In fact, he hadn’t been moved at all. His name was just missing. 

That man is one of thousands of detained immigrants with “Final Orders of Removal” whose records have been hidden or deleted from ICE’s tracking system, leaving families and lawyers unable to locate them. 

As the Associated Press reported on Monday, those records began to vanish September 15. Thousands of people in ICE custody are likely affected.

ICE disputes the claim. “ICE does not “disappear” people. This is a ridiculous lie that the media is peddling to demonize ICE law enforcement,” an ICE representative told Mother Jones via email. “Additionally, Illegal [sic] aliens in detention have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.” 

But that communication can’t happen unless family members and lawyers know where the person is being held. And obstacles to communication can have life-altering consequences—particularly for those whose orders of removal have been issued in absentia, or because they missed a court date. 

“Often they didn’t even know the court hearing happened,” Marandett said. If lawyers find out in time, they can file a motion to reopen a person’s case based on lack of notice. 

ICE “is working rapidly overtime,” as the agency’s representative put it in their statement, to deport as many people as possible. And being unable to locate a client can hamstring a lawyer’s last-minute appeal. 

One notable absence from ICE’s Detainee Locator is Wilber Garcés Pérez, the Venezuelan delivery worker shot by a federal agent in Texas on Sunday. Garcés was taken into custody, hastily discharged from the hospital with a bullet still lodged in the back of his neck, and moved to detention within hours of being shot. He was then, according to the Washington Post, left on the floor of the South Texas ICE Processing Center with the bullet still in his spine. 

Meanwhile, Garcés’ lawyers and family were unable to track him down. Eventually, attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch was able to get in contact with him, she said in a series of social media posts. His deportation order, Lincoln-Goldfinch said, was issued in error when Garcés, who reportedly has a work permit, missed an immigration court hearing and was ordered removed in absentia—after the court sent notice of the hearing to the wrong address. 

“I see this all the time in my practice and it’s a mistake we can easily correct,” Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote. “It does not justify shooting people in the street.” 

Other groups of people who technically have final orders of removal—but are not, in practice, about to be deported—may also have their names removed from the Detainee Locator. That includes immigrants who have open circuit court appeals, as well as those who were granted withholding of removal under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and can’t be deported to their home countries. It may also include some people in active habeas corpus litigation, in which a lawyer must provide proof of where their client is. Usually, the best proof of where Marandett’s clients are being held is a screenshot of the Detainee Locator. Without it, “you may literally not know what district to file a lawsuit in.” 

There’s little apparent consistency in who disappears. Immigration attorney Stefi Bastiaensz says that one of her clients, who came to the US fleeing political persecution in Nicaragua and has been held in New Jersey’s notorious Delaney Hall detention center for nearly a year, is technically under a final order of removal while his case moves through the appeals process. His profile, however, still shows up on Detainee Locator. 

“What makes my firm panic is whether ICE is looking underneath the final order,” Bastiaensz said. A pending habeas petition, or other relief, may not matter to the agency. 

There are other ways lawyers can find their clients—immigration lawyer Pedro Chavez posted some examples in an Instagram video—but none are as efficient as the detainee locator. And families can be left with very few tactics beyond waiting for a phone call from their loved one or contacting their member of Congress. “Regardless of what’s going on, this puts a wall between attorneys and their clients, and produces tremendous anxiety for families,” Bastiaensz said. 

Obstacles to client communication aren’t exactly new to immigration lawyers. But “now it’s like we’re dealing with these same obstacles, but with a blindfold on,” Marandett said.

Fonte: Mother Jones Magazine