Democrats accuse ICE of creating ‘disappearances’ on US soil

A group of 36 lawmakers says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created “disappearances” on US soil, due to the “increasingly unreliable” online system used to track people detained by immigration authorities, according to a letter shared with the Guardian.The lawmakers, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren, are urging that the DHS inspector general’s office open an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “online detainee locator system” (ODLS), which has been used for years by family members, attorneys and journalists to track people in the federal immigration detention system.“Since January 2025, that system has grown increasingly unreliable,” the lawmakers, including Senator Ben Ray Luján and House representatives Veronica Escobar and Lauren Underwood, say in the letter. “Without a functional locator system, DHS is effectively creating ‘disappearances’ on US soil, and we urge the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) to investigate this matter.”The scathing letter, submitted to the DHS OIG on Monday evening, comes as the Trump administration continues with its aggressive anti-immigrant arrest, detention and deportation practices.The ICE detention system is made up of a network of large and small facilities, jails, military bases and federal prisons, many of which are privately owned and operated. Often the agency will quickly and quietly shuffle detained immigrants from one facility to another.ICE created the ODLS in 2010 so family members and attorneys could quickly and accurately track people detained by ICE in its detention network. Before the Trump administration, ICE added people to its locator system within eight hours of their arrival to an ICE facility. But since the Trump administration took office last year, there has been a radical increase of complaints that the ODLS is not working properly.“Reports now indicate that many detained individuals are not showing up in the online detainee locator system in a timely fashion, if at all,” the letter reads. “In some cases, individuals are deported before their location is ever added to the online locator system.”In a statement, the DHS OIG said they received the letter but cannot conduct the review of the Online Detainee Locator System during the now eight-week-long DHS shutdown.“Due to the lapse in DHS OIG’s appropriation, the personnel who conduct such reviews are furloughed,” the DHS OIG said. “With the exception of work funded by other than annual appropriations (ie, disaster-related projects) we cannot initiate new work, and our current projects are paused. Once the lapse ends, OIG will evaluate all requests for audits and evaluations in accordance with our risk-based process.”In the past year, a series of high-profile ICE arrests have led to criticism of the Trump administration’s enforcement tactics, including the case of Any Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old college freshman from Massachusetts.Lopez Belloza was trying to surprise her family for Thanksgiving break last fall. But as she attempted to board her Boston flight, she was arrested by immigration agents and then quickly deported to Honduras. Advocates say her case undercuts the Trump administration’s repeated claims that ICE is only targeting “criminals” and “the worst of the worst”.Court records reviewed by the Guardian suggest Lopez Belloza’s deportation could have been prevented had the ODLS been updated properly.Immediately after Lopez Belloza’s arrest, her family tried to quickly hire attorneys to prevent her deportation. As her family scrambled, she was shackled and quickly transferred to an ICE facility in Texas. But no one, including her family and new attorneys, knew of her transfer out of Massachusetts, since ICE officials did not make the change to the agency’s ODLS, court records say.“The ICE locator system that is supposed to tell the outside world where a detainee is located did not reflect that change [to Texas]”, the court records read. ICE “denied Any’s repeated requests to make additional phone calls”.As far as her family and attorneys knew, Lopez Belloza was still in ICE custody in Boston, so her attorneys filed a petition in a Massachusetts court to try to stop her deportation. Before anyone heard from Lopez Belloza again, ICE quickly deported her to Honduras, flying her out of Texas. The Trump administration later said it was a “mistake” to deport the college student. She remains in Honduras.Lopez Belloza’s case is one of many that the lawmakers link to in their letter to the DHS OIG, demanding an investigation.“There have been similar anecdotal reports of the locator showing that a person is detained at a particular detention center yet facility contractors telling attorneys the individual is not at that facility,” the lawmakers write. “In other cases, it appears that detainees are not being added to the ODLS at all.”The lawmakers point to a series of factors that are leading to the problems with the detainee locator system, including the high number of people in detention, the high rate of transfers and “systemic failures” at new facilities. There are currently more than 70,000 people detained by ICE.Some of the changes in the past year under the Trump administration have led to an inherent opacity with immigration-related detention, including through its use of non-traditional detention sites.After ICE arrests someone, they will detain the person in “holding facilities”, which are typically made up of small, concrete rooms designed for temporary detention. Since they are not traditional detention centers, those facilities lack significant oversight. Lawmakers say in their letter that ICE is not quickly updating holding facility detentions in the ODLS and cite reporting by the Guardian from last fall, which revealed that ICE had been detaining people inside the secretive holding rooms for days or even weeks, in violation of its own federal policy.Last year, Florida opened its own immigration detention facility with support from the Trump administration. Since the facility is state-run, locating people at the site has been a tremendous challenge, with the lawmakers pointing to the “unconventional” facility as contributing to the “systemic ODLS failures”.“To understand the full scope of this problem, the reasons for the ODLS’s reporting gaps, and the impacts of these gaps on detainees and their families, we request that your office conduct an evaluation of this matter,” the lawmakers write. The lawmakers also included a series of questions to the DHS OIG, including whether the locator system also shows the location of individuals in other non-conventional detention facilities, like the Guantánamo Bay naval base.