Immigrant Rights Coalition Urges United Nations to Intervene After Ice Conceals Location of Thousands of Detained Immigrants
Online Detainee Locator System homepage
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.
