Bummer: NICE Is “Electronically Disappear” Illegals With Final Deportation Orders

Hey, there is actually a way to avoid all this: leave voluntarily. The government will even pay you to leave

ICE Begins Electronically ‘Disappearing’ People in Custody: What You Need to Know

When a person is arrested and detained by the U.S. government, it should be possible to find out where that person is being held. For generations, that was true for people held in immigration detention centers — until last week, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rolled out a startling new policy.

Beginning September 15, people held at ICE detention centers who are subject to final orders of removal (even if they are appealing that order or have some other legal basis to remain in the country) will no longer be listed in the Online Detainee Locator System; and according to the Washington Post, ICE staff have been instructed to refuse to provide the location of those people to attorneys and family.

The online detainee locator system was first put in place during the Obama administration, and allows anyone to enter a person’s name and country of birth and find out where that person is being detained by ICE. Before the system went into place, families and attorneys would have to call the local ICE office and ask for the person’s location. But at no point in the past were officials ever ordered to deliberately withhold detainees’ locations.

Generations? Obama wasn’t in office generations ago.

ICE’s new policy specifically targets people with final orders of removal. Those people enter ICE detention in a couple of different ways. Some people are detained by ICE before they have been ordered removed and go through the removal process while in detention. These people are now disappearing from the detainee locator system the moment their removal order becomes final, even if their physical location has not yet changed.

Other people who are taken into custody already have final orders of removal and have been targeted by ICE to execute the order of removal and carry out a deportation. In total, there are at least 1.4 million people living in the U.S. who have final orders of removal. Many people in this situation were ordered removed in the past for missing a court hearing (often unintentionally). After this latest policy change, these individuals will never show up on the ICE detainee locator system once arrested.

Well, darn, looks like they are going bye bye. As should happen.

Knowing where a person is being detained is very important to people on the outside trying to get in contact. Each detention center has its own visitation rules and processes, and there is no centralized visitation and contact system. Without knowing where a loved one is held, family members would have no choice but to wait until the person being detained finds a way to contact them from the inside. But that may not even be possible — for decades, ICE has made it incredibly difficult for people to have phone access in detention.

So, they’re all being scared? Yeah, that’s the point, so whole families up and go.