US Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed detainees subject to final deportation orders from its online locator system on September 15, 2026, three current and former ICE officials told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several immigration lawyers told AP that their clients with final removal orders vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association issued a warning to members on Friday.

ICE did not publicize the move. In a statement to AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it, saying only that detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.

The change affects detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court. Nearly 16,000 people arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to such orders — more than a third of overall bookings — according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a research effort based at UC Berkeley and UCLA. ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. About 30% of detainees in custody likely had final removal orders, said Michelle Méndez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.

The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California, or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival as part of litigation over their detention practices.

The effort to hide detainees’ locations adds to ways the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.

“As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation,” said Greg Chen, the senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Chen said the loss was especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation.

“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported, and they don’t know where the person might be,” Chen told 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.”

Lawyers told AP the change could accelerate deportations by making it harder to file last-minute legal challenges. Final-order detainees still have options to challenge their detention and removal, including seeking to reopen their cases or bringing what is known as a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering detainees to be released or granted bond hearings.

“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 My Khanh Ngo, an ACLU attorney representing eight Somali men detained at the US military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Ngo said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.

The eight Guantánamo detainees are among those removed from the locator, Ngo said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has argued that people subject to final removal orders have received due process. That usually means an immigration judge ordered their removal after a hearing, including cases where immigrants failed to appear, and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.

Still, some detainees have legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many face removal to third-party countries where they have no ties, lawyers told AP, and the removal from the locator will make legal challenges harder in such cases.

More people have been issued final removal orders after missing hearings in recent months, Méndez said, because the administration’s immigration courts have taken steps that make it harder to participate in or reopen cases.

“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” Méndez said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”

ICE launched its online detainee locator in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers and the public to search for people in custody. Before then, they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to try to track detainees down.

Many advocates and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield detainees’ locations for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been held by US Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transported are not in the system, among others.

But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada said every one of her clients with a final order had disappeared from the locator, including 17 people as of Monday.