On Sept. 15, a group of people in federal immigration custody became harder to find.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped displaying the detention locations of most people who have final removal orders in its Online Detainee Locator System, according to reporting by The Associated Press. The people themselves remained in government custody. The location information lawyers and families had routinely used to find them disappeared.
It was not publicly announced. So far, ICE has not released the memorandum, identified who authorized the change, or offered any justification.
But lawyers began seeing the result.
According to the AP, the 17 clients of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights with final removal orders all disappeared from the EOIR’s Locator once the change was made. A U.S. ACLU attorney said they had eight Somali clients disappear once removal proceedings were terminated. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) notified its members that the Locator no longer provided any information for clients in a particular immigration proceeding.
This narrows down a small portion of the broad implications this policy might have.
No documented case through Sept. 28 shows that the locator change itself caused someone to miss a court deadline, lose a case, or be removed before a lawyer could act. There is also no evidence that ICE adopted the policy to block lawyers or courts.
What is already clear is more concrete: ICE has withdrawn a routine source of information from lawyers representing people who can still have time-sensitive legal options.
Similarly, in Kentucky, 1,200 people were being held for ICE in county jails as of July. Kentucky’s IA system was already opaque.
A person can still be in custody while disappearing from the search
ICE’s detainee locator was built in part to allow family members and legal representatives to determine where a person in immigration custody was being held.
Before Sept. 15, having a final removal order did not by itself make a detainee unsearchable.
The new policy changed that.
According to the AP, three current or former ICE officials described a policy that suppresses the locations of most detainees with administratively final removal orders, with exceptions at facilities where courts have ordered ICE to disclose location information.
That pattern suggests it is not a site that is down or a simple case of outdated information. The agency is withholding the information under a legal status.
According to the Washington Post, DHS issued further instructions to ICE. Citing former DHS officials, the Washington Post says ICE instructed its officers to not give the location of detained persons to their lawyers or relatives over the phone.
ICE has not publicly confirmed that instruction.
This brings us to the options the government currently describes for attorneys to help locate or connect with clients.
ICE directs legal representatives to Enforcement and Removal Operations field offices, detention facilities, agency contact channels, and the Detention Reporting and Information Line. Lawyers generally must have a Form G-28 on file before ICE can release protected information.
This means there are other ways to obtain information about detainees aside from the public locator system.
Changes to the public-facing ICE protocols happened on September 15. However, we don't have information showing that the former processes ICE relied on to share this information are sufficient to ensure a location for a final orders detainee is provided when the locator card is not.
If reported telephone restrictions are happening on a wide scale, then it will be hard for agencies to locate represented clients through normal channels.
A final removal order does not end every legal proceeding
The significance of where a detainee is being held depends on the legal remedies still available.
Issuance of a final removal order does not mean there are available appeals for all persons. This will depend upon the facts of the case and the stage of the proceeding.
But finality also does not mean the legal system is finished with every case.
People with final orders can, in qualifying circumstances, seek motions to reopen or reconsider, ask DHS for a stay of removal, or seek a stay from an immigration court or the Board of Immigration Appeals when an appropriate motion is pending. Some proceedings, including certain motions involving removal orders entered when a person was absent, carry automatic stays.
Many others do not.
For discretionary stays, simply filing a request generally does not stop the government from carrying out the removal order. The stay must be granted.
The Justice Department’s immigration court guidance says removal from physical custody constitutes an emergency for the purpose of considering a request for an emergency stay.
That is where location can become more than an administrative detail.
A lawyer trying to act quickly may need to know where a client is being held, how to communicate with the client and, in some federal court cases, who the proper custodian is.
The locator change has already removed the easiest public route for answering the first of those questions for the covered group.
What has not yet been documented is the next step in the causal chain: a case in which that information gap itself prevented a lawyer from obtaining relief.
Courts can sometimes work around an unknown location
The legal consequences are not absolute either.
Five days before ICE’s new locator policy took effect, a federal court in Tennessee confronted a habeas case involving an immigration detainee whose lawyer could not locate him through the locator.
Ordinarily, a “core” habeas case challenging physical custody is filed where the detainee is confined and names the immediate custodian.
Courts have recognized an exception to this rule when the government fails to disclose the location of a detainee or the name of the government employee in charge of the detainee.
In Patel v. Bullock, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee applied that exception.
The decision does not make location irrelevant. It does show that an unknown detention site does not automatically make habeas relief impossible.
Courts can also impose more direct safeguards.
On Sept. 24, a federal judge in New York issued a permanent injunction governing detention practices at 26 Federal Plaza that requires covered transfer locations to be entered into the detainee locator within three hours and includes protections for confidential attorney calls.
According to the AP, facilities operating under court orders requiring disclosure are exceptions to the new ICE policy.
Those protections matter. They also remain geographically limited. Nothing identified in the reporting establishes a nationwide replacement that gives lawyers the same current location information ICE has withdrawn from the public system.
Kentucky is exposed to the national policy, but a Kentucky case has not been documented
Kentucky’s connection to the change is real but limited by what is known.
Kentucky Lantern reported Sept. 10 that roughly 1,200 people were being held for ICE in Kentucky jails as of July. About a dozen county jails were receiving payment to house federal immigration detainees.
Those detainees are part of the national ICE custody system.
But the reporting so far has not identified a particular person held in Kentucky who had a final removal order and then lost a visible location in the locator because of the Sept. 15 policy.
Kentucky should not be described as a place where a detainee has already been shown to have had a location withheld under the new policy.
There is, however, evidence that the locator has practical legal value here. A federal immigration habeas petition filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky on Sept. 1 included an ICE Detainee Locator System result as an exhibit identifying detention.
County jail rosters cannot be substituted for the missing data.
According to Kentucky Lantern, jails’ responses showed inconsistent identification of immigrants in ICE custody. Some jails didn’t disclose the presence of ICE detainees. Others, Kentucky Lantern wrote, “made it hard to distinguish” immigrants in ICE’s custody.
The result is a clear transmission pathway: Kentucky holds a significant number of people for ICE, lawyers in Kentucky have used the federal locator in detention litigation, and the federal government has now withdrawn location information for a category of detainees.
Whether a particular Kentucky detainee has already been affected remains unverified.
The missing document could answer the biggest questions
The biggest unanswered questions are inside ICE.
The order authorizing the change on Sept. 15 is still not publicly available. So it is still unknown which official issued the order, why the agency took this action, the justification, the scope of the restriction, whether there are any exceptions to the order, and whether there is a process to obtain the location orders through attorney vetting only.
Those are questions that records could answer.
A targeted Freedom of Information Act request to ICE could seek directives, memoranda, implementation guidance, system-change instructions, approval records, and legal or privacy reviews created during September. It could also seek instructions given to field offices, detention facilities, and the agency’s information line about disclosing the locations of final-order detainees.
That would not restore someone to the locator. It could establish who ordered the change and how ICE intended it to operate.
Other accountability mechanisms work at different levels.
An individual facing imminent removal may have access to emergency stays, habeas proceedings, or other case-specific relief depending on the circumstances. Federal courts have demonstrated that they can impose location and attorney-access requirements when the legal standards for relief are met.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also accepts complaints. However, a complaint does not initiate an OIG investigation.
Congress can seek documents and testimony from DHS. A bill introduced in June, H.R. 9374, the Find Our Families Act of 2026, would require DHS to develop and maintain an online detainee locator system. It has been introduced and referred to House committees; it is not current law.
Kentucky’s open-records law provides a different kind of leverage over local jails.
A Kentucky attorney general decision this year concluded that federal regulations can restrict disclosure of records about individual federal detainees, but do not automatically shield records dealing only with jail administration. That leaves room for narrowly written requests to counties for contracts, payments, inspections and facility-wide policies connected to ICE detention without seeking protected information about individual detainees.
None of those mechanisms answers the question ICE has so far left unresolved.
Beginning Sept. 15, the agency deliberately stopped showing the locations of most detainees with final removal orders. Lawyers have already reported losing the locator’s visibility into existing clients.
What remains missing is not only the location information.
It is the government record explaining who ordered that information withheld, how far the policy reaches, and what ICE believes lawyers and families should use in its place.
Sources
Associated Press, Sept. 21, 2026 — Reporting on ICE’s Sept. 15 locator change, attorney examples, and court-order exceptions:
https://apnews.com/article/c3329a70bce424879bc5880b286c019cThe Washington Post, Sept. 21, 2026 — Reporting on the alleged restriction against disclosing detainee locations by telephone:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/09/21/immigrants-with-final-deportation-orders-disappear-ice-detainee-locator/American Immigration Lawyers Association — Practitioner reporting on final-order detainees disappearing from the Online Detainee Locator System:
https://www.aila.org/library/featured-issue-u-s-immigration-courts-under-trump-2-0?limit=200Department of Homeland Security — Online Detainee Locator System privacy and purpose documentation:
https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhsicepia-019-online-detainee-locator-systemU.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — Public guidance for attorneys and others seeking information through ERO and related contact channels:
https://www.ice.gov/contact/opeU.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review — Guidance on motions, stays and emergency requests involving imminent removal:
https://www.justice.gov/eoir/policy-manual-eoir/part-II/icpm/chapter-4-7
https://www.justice.gov/eoir/policy-manual-eoir/part-III/bia/chapter-5-3Patel v. Bullock, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Sept. 10, 2026 — Habeas ruling addressing an undisclosed detention location and immediate custodian:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/tennessee/tnmdce/3%3A2026cv01226/111480/13/Barco Mercado v. Mullin, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Sept. 24, 2026 — Permanent injunction addressing locator updates and attorney access at 26 Federal Plaza:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1%3A2025cv06568/647291/187/Kentucky Lantern, Sept. 10, 2026 — Reporting on ICE detention in Kentucky and the limits of county jail rosters:
https://kentuckylantern.com/2026/09/10/reports-say-ice-detention-is-growing-in-ky-but-records-details-remain-unclear-advocates-say/Lexington Records / The Lexington Times — Eastern District of Kentucky immigration habeas case that included an ICE Detainee Locator System result:
https://records.lexingtonky.news/federal-court/case/2-26-cv-00364/Kentucky Attorney General, 26-ORD-150 — Open-records decision addressing records concerning federal detainees and jail administration:
https://www.ag.ky.gov/Resources/orom/2026/26-ORD-150.pdfGovInfo, H.R. 9374 — Find Our Families Act of 2026 — Introduced federal legislation concerning an online detainee locator system:
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119hr9374ih