ICE has stopped listing many detainees with final orders of removal in its online locator. The change began on September 15 without a formal announcement, and it has made it far harder for families and lawyers to find people in custody. Here is what we know so far, how to keep searching for a loved one, and what legal options may still be available.
What is happening
According to The Associated Press, ICE removed many detainees with final orders of removal from its online locator. A final order of removal is a deportation order from an immigration judge, usually issued after a hearing and either upheld on appeal or never appealed. It also covers cases where a person missed their hearing and the judge ordered removal in their absence. The AP based its report on three current and former ICE officials who spoke anonymously, and several lawyers confirmed their clients vanished from the system that week.
ICE never announced the change. When the AP asked, the agency neither confirmed nor denied it, and said people with final orders are being prioritized for deportation. Mother Jones asked as well, and an ICE spokesperson rejected the idea that anyone is being disappeared, adding that detainees still have ways to reach their families and lawyers.
The number of people this could affect is large. ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA shows nearly 16,000 people booked into detention in July had final removal orders, more than a third of all bookings. The change does not appear to reach everyone, though. The AP reports it does not apply at Adelanto in California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City and suburban Chicago, where judges have ordered ICE to list detainees promptly, and Mother Jones found the pattern uneven, with some people who have final orders still showing up in the locator.
What to do if you cannot find your loved one
Search the locator first, but do not treat a blank result as an answer. You can search with the person's A-number (the nine digits that appear on immigration papers like court notices, application receipts and work permits) and country of birth, or with their name, adding a date of birth if you have it. The system needs an exact match, so try different spellings of the name, and take a screenshot of anything you find. Before this change, a missing record could already mean a delay, a recent transfer or a typo. Since September 15, it can also mean the person has a final order and was pulled from the public system, which is not the same as being deported or released.
If the search comes up empty, keep going. Call the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations field office for your area and ask for the name of the officer in charge of the case, giving only the basic information you would enter in the locator. Advocates also recommend checking the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator and VINELink, since people are sometimes held in federal prisons or state custody first, and working through ICE's public list of detention facilities one by one. Keep in mind the National Immigration Law Center published these steps before the change, so they may take more persistence now. As Mother Jones notes, lawyers have other ways to find clients, but none as quick as the locator, and families are often left waiting for a call or turning to their member of Congress.
Write down every call and every answer as you go, because a clear timeline can help later. You can contact the person's consulate too, though NILC warns against it if the person you are looking for is seeking asylum or fears their government. And if you can reach an immigration attorney, tell them right away that the locator shows nothing, since NILC notes some attorneys can confirm a location through a website ICE offers for scheduling legal calls.
All of this is worth doing fast. The locator matters to lawyers as much as to families, and time is often short: detainees are frequently moved between facilities before a deportation, which fuels panic and the fear that someone has already been sent away. A lawyer who cannot find a client cannot tell a court where that client is, and that alone can make it nearly impossible to stop a removal in time.
There is hope, even with a final order
A final order of removal is serious, and ICE is treating these cases as a priority. Even so, it rarely means every door is closed. Depending on the facts, a person may still be able to ask the immigration court to reopen the case. For an order issued because someone missed a hearing, federal regulations say a motion to reopen can be filed at any time if the person never received proper notice, or was in federal or state custody through no fault of their own, and within 180 days when the reason is an exceptional circumstance like a serious illness. Filing that motion automatically pauses the removal while the judge decides, but a person gets only one, so it has to be right the first time. And because immigration courts have made reopening harder, according to Michelle Mendez of the National Immigration Project, any deadline is worth confirming with an attorney.
There are also ways to push back once someone is detained, and they fall into two different lanes. The first challenges the detention itself. A habeas petition asks a federal judge to decide whether continuing to hold the person is lawful, and in Zadvydas v. Davis the Supreme Court confirmed that a judge can review this even after a removal order is final. As a general rule, the government may hold someone for up to six months while it works to carry out the deportation. After that, if there is no real prospect of removing them any time soon, they can ask the court to order their release. The AP reports that federal judges have already granted thousands of these rulings, ordering people released or given bond hearings, though every case turns on its own facts.
The second lane challenges the deportation order itself, not the detention. That goes through a petition for review, which has to be filed with a federal court of appeals within 30 days of the final order and does not pause the deportation unless the court specifically orders it, so timing is everything. It's important to keep in mind that some people cannot legally be returned to their own country because they would likely be tortured or persecuted there. Even so, lawyers told the AP that many of them are now being sent to third countries where they have no ties at all, which is why you need to stay informed of every step of the process.
How to prepare your family now
Do not wait to see whether the locator shows someone before you get ready. Always know the A-number and country of birth, keep copies of immigration papers and court notices, and save the name and phone number of an immigration attorney where you can find it. If someone you love has a final order of removal, talk to an immigration attorney now, not after something happens.
Do you need help with a final order of removal? Our team at Landerholm Immigration can talk through what options may still be available. Call our Oakland office at (510) 574-7377 or visit us at 1900 Embarcadero, Suite 310, Oakland, CA 94606. |
Sources: Associated Press (September 21, 2026), Mother Jones (September 23, 2026), USAGov, the ICE Online Detainee Locator System brochure, the National Immigration Law Center, 8 CFR 1003.23, the EOIR Immigration Court Practice Manual, 8 U.S.C. 1252, and Zadvydas v. Davis (2001).