U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding most detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, in a move that has made it harder for lawyers and relatives to find them. ICE this week quietly removed the names of those detainees — who make up more 1/3 of the agency’s recent bookings — from its online detainee locator system. The practice applies to detainees who are subject to final orders of removal from an immigration court. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.
