U.S. routinely and systematically disappears immigrants who enter federal custody; immigrants’ whereabouts effectively concealed from families, advocates

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@freedomforimmigrants.org

WASHINGTON, D.C., on International Day of the Disappeared – In violation of international law, the United States is engaged in a pattern and practice of regularly disappearing immigrants in its federal immigration detention system, according to a startling report published today by Freedom for Immigrants (FFI).

Through surveys, interviews and ongoing work with people in detention and their loved ones, FFI documented 698 enforced disappearances of immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody between 2017 and 2021. The report accompanied a civil rights complaint submitted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Office of the Inspector General, which outlines short-term interventions that ICE should take to end the regular disappearances.

ICE, the primary federal agency responsible for detaining immigrants, commits what the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner terms “enforced disappearances” through its “refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty” of people who remain in its custody. Notably, the United States has not signed on to the United Nations’ International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.

The report shines a spotlight on how the secretive immigration detention system effectively conceals the whereabouts of those in its custody from families and advocates, disappearing people for days, weeks, months, or longer. At time of publication, dozens of cases of disappearances documented in the report remained unresolved.

The ICE Locator – the main tool provided to families to locate their loved ones – has long been riddled with problems and has now become so erroneous that it routinely fails to identify and locate people in ICE custody, systematically obstructing access to legal counsel, human rights monitoring and essential familial connection and support, according to the report.

“For days, I went on thinking that my dad was dead,” said Yunuen Alvarado Bustos, whose father went missing in the detention system for more than a week after entering the U.S. in 2020. “All we could do was put in his alien [federal identification] number. Over the whole experience, it was very traumatizing. As an immigrant, I already live with fear and trauma that I experience at the hands of the United States. Not knowing where my dad was – or if he was even alive – was horrifying. It was painful not knowing where he was. That was one of the worst experiences of my life.”

“The immigration detention system is designed to dehumanize, and it’s clear enforced disappearances are a feature – not a bug – of this abusive system,” said Layla Razavi, deputy executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, who contributed to the report. “It’s time the U.S. reckoned with the true nature of immigration detention. Disappearances are endemic to this system, and with these abuses, the U.S. instills fear and trauma into entire immigrant communities. On this International Day of the Disappeared, we’re calling on the Biden administration to act on the urgent moral imperative to phase out the unconscionable immigration detention system.”

Disappearances documented in the report often followed instances of ICE transferring people in detention, including individual transfers between ICE facilities, mass transfers between ICE facilities and transfers from law enforcement custody to immigration detention. In many cases, advocates were unable to locate someone in immigration detention after that person participated in advocacy or protest.

Enforced disappearances inflict a uniquely horrific and lasting psychological toll upon the families and loved ones of the disappeared, and family members of disappeared persons who are themselves undocumented or have irregular immigration status may be doubly paralyzed by fears of not being able to openly engage in a search or campaign to find their loved ones without putting themselves at risk. Medical experts have characterized the slow mental anguish associated with not knowing the whereabouts and condition of a loved one as a mental trauma that “defies emotional comprehension.”

“Nobody at ICE knew where he was. They would give us another number to call; then that person would give us another number,” recalled Tracy Wright, an Iowa resident whose brother-in-law was detained by ICE at Hardin County Jail in Eldora, Iowa, in June 2020. “How do you just lose him? If it were their family member, would they be okay with that response? These are people just like anybody else. They have families, children, wives, husbands who are worried about them.”

Key findings of the report include:

424 enforced disappearances of immigrants reported by families and advocates since January 2017.
- At the time of publication, at least 18 percent of these instances remained unresolved.
- More than half of these enforced disappearances followed a transfer, including individual transfers between ICE facilities, mass transfers between ICE facilities, and transfers from law enforcement custody to immigration detention.
216 enforced disappearances documented by FFI staff in which an individual’s location could not be found via the ICE Locator for more than five days between April 2020 and August 2021.
58 enforced disappearances documented by FFI staff in which an individual’s name produced “zero matching records” for more than five days between April 2020 and August 2021.
20 immigration detention facilities, caging at least 10% of all people in the ICE detention system, failed to appear in ICE’s online database of detention facilities; in fact, there are entire U.S. states for which detention facilities are omitted.

The report concludes that the U.S. must end its abusive immigration detention system immediately but no later than within the next three years. In the meantime, FFI recommends that Congress, with the leadership of the Biden-Harris administration, ratify the U.N.’s International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.

Finally, the report authors outline intermediate steps the U.S. should implement to prevent enforced disappearances, including guaranteed free telephone communication with family and counsel, up-to-date official databases and accurate, easily accessible records of people in detention made available to family members, NGOs and members of the public.

The full report can be read here.

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