Over 30 organizations submit emergency UN request after ICE removes individuals with final removal orders from its Online Detainee Locator System

September 30, 2026, Washington, DC – Earlier today, a group of over 30 organizations petitioned the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) to intervene after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed thousands of detained immigrants with final orders from its Online Detainee Locator System (ODLS) on September 15, limiting their access to legal counsel, the court system, and due process. 

ODLS is an online system used to track the locations of individuals in ICE custody. Originally created in 2010, it has become an especially crucial tool for attorneys, families, and community members amid the Trump administration’s extraordinary efforts to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens – often without notice or due process, and pursuant to third-country agreements. 

Detained immigrants are regularly transferred among hundreds of detention sites nationwide. Without ODLS, family members have no way to locate their detained loved ones, and attorneys cannot pursue legal avenues of relief for their clients, including motions to reopen, appeals, habeas petitions, or stays of deportation. 

“The new ODLS policy is aimed at forcibly disappearing and secretly detaining noncitizens with final orders of removal,” said the signatories. “By subjecting noncitizens to this policy, the United States has placed these individuals beyond the reach of legal protections, and rendered them particularly vulnerable to unlawful detention and deportation.”

ICE made no public announcement or warning prior to this new policy change, leaving attorneys and family members to scramble for information after their clients and loved ones’ locations were removed from the system on September 15. 

In one case cited in the petition, attorneys at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center were unable to locate their clients – a breastfeeding mother and her 7-year-old daughter – after their abrupt removal from ODLS, temporarily obstructing the clients’ access to counsel and leaving family members terrified about their possible deportation. Other participating organizations highlighted similar client stories, including an LGBTQ+ asylum seeker from Ghana whose legal team at Human Rights First has been unable to pursue lawful avenues for relief because they cannot confirm his location. 

One client quoted in the report described the terror he felt when his mother, an elderly asylum seeker with a disability, disappeared from the ICE locator: "We speak on the phone at least three times every day. Several days ago, I became extremely frightened when, because of a technical problem, phone service at the detention facility was suddenly cut off. She did not call me the entire day, and by that evening I checked the ICE detainee locator webpage and discovered that she had disappeared from it. I almost had a heart attack because she had always been listed there, and then she suddenly vanished. At that moment, the darkest thoughts imaginable went through my mind as to what my mother could be going through.”

The participating organizations called upon the UN WGEID to issue a formal declaration stating that the new ODLS policy is a form of enforced disappearance; recommend an immediate end to the policy; and conduct an urgent on-site trip to the United States to investigate. 

"At the Center for Constitutional Rights, we have two clients who have been 'disappeared' from the ICE online locator," said Senior Staff Attorney CJ Sandley. "Thankfully we know where they are currently, but they could be whisked away in the dark of night to another detention or a third-country, and we would not know where they are for hours or days. This is, of course, a strategic move on ICE's part: to further isolate people from their communities and lawyers in moments of high need. We are asking the U.N. Working Group to call this what it is: unlawful disappearances."

The UN WGEID was created in 1980 to investigate enforced disappearances, which are formally defined as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State” followed by “a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.” The UN Human Rights Committee has previously determined that such disappearances violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States ratified in the early 1990s. 

The full list of signatories includes Abolitionist Law Center, Human Rights Program; Acacia Center for Justice; ACLU of Louisiana; American Gateways; Americans for Immigrant Justice; Amnesty International; CAIR-Chicago (The Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations); Cameroon Advocacy Network; Center for Constitutional Rights; Chicago United Families Coalition; Estrella del Paso; Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project; Haitian Bridge Alliance; Human Rights First; Immigrant Children Advocates' Relief Effort (ICARE); Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef); Immigrant Legal Resource Center; Law Offices of Stephen C. Zollman; Lawyers for Good Government; LSN Legal LLC; Mountain State Justice; New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children; Prisoners' Legal Services of New York; Public Counsel; RAICES; Refugees International; Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center; Sur Legal Collaborative; The Immigration Project Inc.; VECINA; Witness at the Border; and Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights