Rights groups ask UN to challenge secrecy over ICE detainee locations
More than 30 organisations have petitioned a United Nations working group over ICE’s removal of thousands of detainees’ names from its online locator. They say the change has hindered access to lawyers and separated families, while the Department of Homeland Security rejects claims that the practice amounts to enforced disappearance.
More than 30 human-rights and immigration organisations have asked a United Nations panel to intervene over a US policy that withholds the locations of thousands of immigration detainees from families and lawyers. The groups petitioned the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed the names of detainees with final removal orders from its Online Detainee Locator System on September 15. The change, which ICE did not announce or explain, affects more than 16,000 of the nearly 69,000 people held in ICE custody, according to the supplied report.
Immigration lawyers say the policy has made it harder to locate clients and challenge deportations, while families have lost track of relatives. The petition asks the UN group to declare the practice a violation of international law and press ICE to end it. The organisations also want all detainees’ locations listed publicly within an hour of arrest and lawyers given 24 hours’ notice before a transfer.
Sarah Decker of the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, one of the petition’s signatories, said a system without transparency lacked accountability. The petition cited cases in which lawyers were unable to reach detainees facing deportation. In one example, a mother and her seven-year-old daughter challenging detention in Texas reportedly lost access to their lawyers before a possible deportation to Venezuela.
A judge ordered ICE to disclose their location, which the agency did about 18 hours later, and the pair were released, according to the petition. The Department of Homeland Security denied that ICE’s practices amounted to making people disappear. It said detainees had opportunities to communicate with relatives and lawyers and that the agency’s process complied with due process.
More than 45 House Democrats separately urged ICE to restore the names, calling the concealment contrary to basic principles of the US legal system. The UN working group was created in 1980 to help families locate people reportedly subjected to disappearance by government agents.
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