By Vanessa Beeley – Sep 24, 2026An investigation by AP has revealed that the notorious ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has stopped publicly “revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.”ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.The move, according to AP, represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.The policy of ghosting applies to detainees who have received final orders of deportation from an immigration court. This will enable the fast-tracking of deportations or ethnic cleansing of Trump’s ‘undesirables’ because last-minute legal challenges will be nothing more than cries in the void.Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.Relatives and lawyers were kept in the dark. ICE made no public statement to announce the controversial move. A statement issued to AP said “detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation.” This while ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.Lawyers and relatives have lost all contact with their clients and family members. This is terrifying because detainees can be arbitrarily moved from one facility to another prior to deportation. This leaves family and loved ones in an information limbo where they have no idea if their person has been deported or is still languishing in a detention center with no access to legal aid or the outside world.ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. Around 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”Lawyers also said some with final removal orders also have legal protection against deportation to their country of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. These bewildered individuals face deportation to third-party countries where they have no family, may not speak the language and no access to support. The ICE disappearance campaign will make it impossible to either legally challenge their deportation or to track where they are being sent.But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday. Among those disappeared from the locator system are eight Somali men being detained at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo, of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases. “If you can’t find your client, don’t know what’s happening to your client, you can’t get that information to the court to stop their removal,” she said.This sinister development has similarities in the practices used by the Zionists for 100 years, to disappear Palestinians and Palestinian history and culture from historical records.“Israel” has confiscated, classified and physically destroyed historical and archival documentation of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — the Nakba. Palestinian cultural heritage has been incrementally removed from view. 2019 investigations by Haaretz and the NGO Akevot exposed the Zionist Ministry of ‘Defence’ secret security unit, Malmab, campaign to remove declassified documents from public archives and to relocate them in locked vaults. This is done under the pretext of national security to prevent historians gaining access to irrefutable evidence of ethnic cleansing, torture, abuse, land-theft and endless war crimes against the Palestinians.Minnesota 15 Hearing Exposes Political Police Operation Against LaborThe following citation is from the Institute of Palestine Studies that has been trying to collate the lost archives and to make them accessible again:Settler-colonial movements such as Zionism are informed by what Patrick Wolfe defined as “the elimination of the Native.”6 Implicit in Israel’s existence as a settler-colonial state is the expectation that it would want to hide evidence of its acts of elimination, particularly in an era that looks unfavorably on colonialism and in the context of a country that purports to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” and a “Jewish and democratic state.” The 1948 Nakba is thus not only an act of elimination, but its erasure from the archives is also part of that act. As Wolfe points out, not all acts of elimination are genocidal, as they were in North America or Australia. In Algeria and South Africa, for example, the removal of the indigenous population was achieved by a combination of land expropriation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. In Palestine, too, an incremental ethnic cleansing, which began in the mid-1920s, has been the principal means pursued to bring about “the elimination of the Native.”The erosion of Palestinian cultural history and identity is also well documented, this from Electronic Intifada:…materials include photographs, films, exhibitions, books, manuscripts, embroidered garments, graphic arts, music and more. The seized Palestinian archives, collections and materials — cultural and otherwise — were typically surveyed and studied by Israeli intelligence and transferred to the pre-state and state’s colonial archives, both military and civilian. In many cases, Palestinian cultural property looted by individuals was also put in Israel’s official archives. An archive serving to preserve historical memory would catalog the context, origin, purpose and authors of the materials, all of which would be easy to glean in the case of these materials seized by Israel. Israel’s purpose, however, is not to preserve Palestinian historical memory but to erase it from the public sphere. Therefore, Palestinian materials are not catalogued and treated according to archival standards and conventions but are instead subjected to colonial ones.Perhaps the most akin to the ICE disappearance of detainees in the US is the mass disappearance of Gazans during the escalated genocide that began on October 7, 2023. Palestinians have disappeared into the shadowy chasm of the Zionist secret prison and detention system. Relatives are stonewalled and left in the dark, not knowing where their loved ones are or even if they are alive.“In Gaza, everyone is considered a target for enforced disappearance,” said Budour Hassan, a Palestinian writer and researcher at Amnesty International. “The abductions are random, meant to instil fear and intimidate the population. Even those who disappear and then reemerge carry stories of terror and scars from the ordeal.”In 2024, Reem Ajour recounts how Zionist forces raided their family home in northern Gaza. She was ordered to leave and forced to abandon her husband and 4-year-old daughter Masaa, both wounded.Months later Reem still had no news of her husband and child. The house was leveled after she left and the Zionist military claimed they did not have her family. “I am living and dead at the same time,” she said.In July 2026, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir reportedly first raised the idea of an ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ modeled on Trump’s version of inhumane and state-sponsored cruelty at the US Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Senior prison officials subsequently toured the crocodile farm at Hamat Gader in northern Israel as part of a preliminary assessment. The project has currently been shelved but not fully eradicated.2025: Following President Trump’s visit to the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility in Miami-Dade County, Bacardi Jackson, Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida, shared the following statement:“As President Trump doubled down on his agenda of fear and division, we’re reminded that this cruel and inhumane stunt is part of a broader strategy to expand the abusive mass detention machine, and in turn, criminalise and disappear members of our communities. Building a prison-like facility on sacred indigenous land in the middle of the Everglades is a direct assault on humanity, dignity, indigenous sovereignty, and the constitutional protections we all share.”An article in The Conversation:The United States government recently announced the opening of a massive immigrant detention facility built deep within the Florida Everglades that’s been dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a media briefing that “there is only one road leading in … and the only way out is a one-way flight.”Now, those same detainees are being disappeared, their fate unknown, their families in a state of psychological limbo. This is abject cruelty targeting some of the most vulnerable members of society whether in the US or in Palestine.There is much denial online of the Zionist security forces training of ICE. However, Peter Edge who was promoted to Acting Deputy Director of ICE did attend training in “Israel” under the pretext of the Anti-Defamation League’s 2015 National Counter Terrorism Institute Seminar. Palantir, staunch Zionist promoters and genocide apologists, are the primary contractor for ICE, providing the data infrastructure and AI systems that facilitate the agency’s identification of victims and their deportation under increasingly questionable conditions.The US and Zionist military, intelligence and security apparatus is merging into one complex of human rights abuses, torture, ethnic cleansing and exploitation of indigenous peoples and those seeking asylum from the despots and barbaric regimes that are supported by the US and the Zionist movement globally. The genocidal model of Gaza has come home to roost in the US, just as many of us argued it would and just as it will elsewhere in the “West.” (Substack)