Lawmakers led by Elizabeth Warren in scathing letter say system used to track detainees ‘increasingly unreliable’
José Olivares at The Guardian:
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 Senator 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 inspector general office 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.
[...] 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.
ICE are vile terrorist scum, and they are creating “disappearances” of those detained by ICE not unlike authoritarian regimes.
