ICE Watch: ICE Quietly Removed Thousands of Detainees From Its Public Locator, AP Reports

ICE Watch & Accountability · Updated October 2, 2026, 2:27 PM CDT

Since September 15, anyone searching ICE’s public database for thousands of detained immigrants has found nothing.

The Associated Press reported that ICE has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding detainees who have final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far harder for lawyers and relatives to find them.^[1]

That is today’s lead story. The rest of this week’s ICE news fits around it: a family suing over a death, a new site for children, a town fighting a detention room, and citizens learning to carry their birth certificates.

1. The names that disappeared

AP reporter Ryan J. Foley wrote that ICE removed those detainees from its online locator on September 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it.^[1]

Lawyers confirmed it. Several contacted by AP said their clients vanished from the system that week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members.^[1]

The scale is large. Nearly 16,000 people booked into ICE detention in July had final removal orders, more than a third of that month’s bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA.^[1]

There are exceptions. The practice does not apply to the Adelanto detention facility in California or to holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City and suburban Chicago, AP’s sources said, because judges ordered ICE to list detainees there promptly in litigation over detention practices.^[1]

ICE did not announce the change. In a statement to AP it neither confirmed nor denied it, and said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” stopping individual removals.^[1]

2. What lawyers say they lost

Greg Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association described the effect on families: “Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be.”^[1]

Atenas Burrola Estrada of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights said “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” 17 in all as of Monday.^[1]

Among those missing from the system are eight Somali men held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to their ACLU attorney, My Khanh Ngo. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.^[1]

Michelle Mendez of the National Immigration Project called it “just another iteration of disappearing people.”^[1]

DHS argues that people with final removal orders have received due process, which usually means an immigration judge ordered removal after a hearing. Those detainees still have options, AP notes, including asking to reopen a case or filing a habeas petition asking a judge to free them.^[1]

The pushback has reached international bodies and Congress. Human rights groups asked a UN panel to help end the practice, and lawmakers urged ICE to restore the locator, according to the headlines of U.S. News and WGNO reports that we could not load in full.^[8]^[9]

3. A family goes to court

On Thursday, the family of Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, filed a major lawsuit against the federal government in Minnesota, the law firm Romanucci & Blandin said.^[2]

Her spouse, Becca Good, their children and her brother, Brent Ganger, are the plaintiffs. The family also filed separate suits against ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who fired the shots, and against other agents and administration officials.^[2]

They allege a conspiracy to target Somali and Hispanic residents for surveillance, and they reject the government’s claim that Good committed an act of terrorism against agents.^[2]

“What happened on Jan. 7 — and what has happened to so many people over the past year — is not what America stands for,” Ganger said.^[2]

Watch NBC News on the lawsuit:

NBC News, a news organization, on YouTube (October 2, 2026): “Renee Good’s family sues U.S. government, ICE officer and Trump officials.”

4. New places, new fights

In Alexandria, Louisiana, a 528-bed facility for families with children, unaccompanied minors and single adult women could start taking people within a week or two, ABC News reported, citing a local airpark official.^[3]

It is in renovated former Air Force barracks. Operators call it a staging center for people who are voluntarily leaving, with an average stay under 48 hours, but an operator also acknowledged they would have to alert ICE if someone tried to leave.^[3]

In Colorado, the city of Glenwood Springs sued the owner of a building ICE uses, on September 25. The city revoked ICE’s permit in April after a community effort using public records showed ICE had held people longer than the 12 hours the permit allowed. The suit says ICE detained 27 people there between May 22 and August 4 anyway.^[4]

5. Citizens in the dragnet

The Independent reports that U.S. citizens are increasingly caught up in the operation. Monique Ramirez, a 43-year-old U.S.-born mother in San Antonio, was pulled over on August 31 by what turned out to be ICE agents. “We carry our birth certificates,” she said. “We are from America. This is our home.”^[5]

Recently in Evanston, Illinois, a Black U.S. citizen was apprehended on his way to collect a prescription in what DHS described as mistaken identity. Local police said he was taken to a hospital with neck and head injuries. DHS said officers “later left the scene without further incident once the individual finally identified himself.”^[5]

And in Pennsylvania, Delaware County nurse Monica Ryadi, 30, has lived legally in the U.S. since she was 9. The Inquirer reports ICE agents handcuffed her at Los Angeles airport on September 15 as her family arrived for a trip to Disneyland. She holds a status called withholding of removal, which the administration now treats differently than before.^[6]

6. The vote that could change cooperation

Bolts and Wisconsin Watch report that in Sauk and Winnebago counties, candidates for sheriff have vowed to quit a federal ICE program if elected on November 3. ICE has recorded about 100 arrests in Sauk County since January 2025, almost all through transfers from the local jail.^[7]

What to watch

Whether ICE restores the locator or confirms the change. Whether courts order it, as judges already did for facilities in Adelanto and the Midwest. And how many detainees are still unreachable by the people trying to find them.

Where these stories happened

1. Minneapolis, Minnesota (Good family lawsuit); 2. Alexandria, Louisiana (new family facility); 3. Glenwood Springs, Colorado (zoning lawsuit); 4. San Antonio, Texas (traffic stop); 5. Baraboo, Wisconsin (Sauk County sheriff race)

Pins mark the cities named in the reports, not exact addresses. Map data: OpenStreetMap contributors.

How to Verify This Yourself

Read the reports directly. Start with the AP story on the locator, then ABC News, Rocky Mountain PBS and Bolts. ICE’s own online detainee locator is at locator.ice.gov.

References

Investigative methodology: this report was written by hand from the reports listed above. Quoted passages are verbatim from those sources and each claim is attributed to the report it comes from. We dropped one item from the earlier version of this post, an April report of a detainee death, because it was nearly six months old.

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Crime & Justice Oct 2, 2026ICE Watch: ICE Quietly Removed Thousands of Detainees From Its Public Locator, AP Reports