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President Donald Trump and his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have transformed America’s immigration system into an astonishingly cruel deportation machine. This week we learned they have once again taken things up a notch. For the past 10 days, the Department of Homeland Security has stopped offering tracking services for anyone arrested and detained with an outstanding removal order, priming detainees to be quickly removed to third countries without ever having spoken to an attorney or even their families. More than 16,000 people are estimated to have been impacted by this new practice, according to a new report by the Associated Press, and immigration attorneys are sounding the alarm.

The Department of Homeland Security has been running an online detainee locator since 2010 where anyone can look up a person being held in immigration detention. This is an especially important tool for immigration attorneys, who use this, often exclusively, to track where their clients are being held in order to call them and meet with them for legal counsel—a constitutional right any person being held by the U.S. government has, regardless of immigration status. On Sept. 15, without any real notice, DHS suddenly began to exclude people who have been arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and who have a removal order against them from their database, making it virtually impossible to find out where they are being held. As of early July, ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people, and around 30 percent of them likely had final removal orders, according to the AP.

Some people who face removal orders have legal protections against their deportation because they face credible threats of torture or persecution in their countries of origin, but the Trump administration has found a loophole with third-country removals. Now, they’ve found yet another workaround: simply not including these folks on DHS’ detainee locator, which is delaying, if not outright preventing, attorneys being able to contact their clients and initiate legal proceedings to protect them from deportation. Meanwhile, since the start of Trump’s second term, the number of deportation flights has been drastically rising, with Human Rights First estimating departures increased by 59 percent in July 2026 alone, compared to the same time last year.

Stephanie Alvarez-Jones is an attorney with the National Immigration Project and has been representing people detained by the Trump administration. I spoke with her to see if any of her clients had gone missing from DHS’ detainee locator, what it might have taken to find them, and what this latest move signals about the Trump administration’s motives when it comes to immigration. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shirin Ali: What goes through your head when you realize a client you’ve been representing is no longer listed on DHS’ detainee locator? 

Stephanie Alvarez-Jones: A number of my clients and other folks at the National Immigration Project have had this happen to them. The initial reaction is panic, especially as we’re seeing this trend of rapid transfers and third-country removals. When I could no longer find someone, that was where my mind immediately jumped to. I started to plug in my client’s information and was getting a message that this person is no longer in the system and I immediately jumped to: Oh my gosh, how could all of these people have been transferred or removed so quickly, we were just in touch. Are they about to be deported?How do I go about finding all of these folks?

We now know that if someone with a removal order is in the process of either being transferred to a detention facility or if they have already been deported, they no longer appear on the ICE locator. You get a message that says the system has changed.

Upon realizing your clients were no longer listed in DHS’ system, what steps did you take to try to find them? And how long did........

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