Stop ICE Electronically Disappearing People in Custody NOW

Subject: ICE must stop disappearing tens of thousands of people from public records! ICE has reportedly removed at least 25 percent of the people in its custody from its public detainee locator. This is not an isolated error involving one or two people. It is the disappearance of tens of thousands of human beings from the records families, attorneys, journalists, and advocates use to find them. A federal agency must not be allowed to hold people in custody while making their whereabouts effectively unknowable. This policy creates immediate risks of unlawful deportation, separation from counsel and family, medical neglect, abuse, and death without accountability. It must be reversed now. ICE reportedly stopped publicly revealing the locations of people with final removal orders, including people who may still have active legal claims or urgent grounds to challenge removal. When families and lawyers cannot find a person, they cannot contact them, verify their safety, prepare filings, or stop an unlawful removal. That is not due process. It is government secrecy used against people with the least power to resist it. The United States is not Argentina’s military dictatorship, and this policy should not be presented as identical to its campaign of state terror. But Argentina’s history is an unmistakable warning: secret detention, official denial, and people disappearing from public records are tools that destroy accountability and enable grave abuses. Argentina’s dictatorship operated clandestine detention centers and disappeared thousands of people while concealing their fate from those who loved them. We must reject even the beginnings of that logic here. I demand that you act immediately to require ICE and DHS to: - Restore complete, current public detainee-location records for every person in ICE custody. - Notify a detainee’s attorney and designated family contact promptly after every detention, transfer, hospitalization, or removal. - Preserve all custody, transfer, and medical records, and prohibit their deletion or concealment. - Guarantee confidential, timely access to legal counsel and halt removals that prevent meaningful legal review. - Establish independent oversight, public reporting, and real penalties for officials and contractors who conceal a person’s whereabouts. The federal government does not get to erase tens of thousands of people from public view and call it immigration enforcement. Restore the records. Restore due process. End this policy immediately.