Your Brother Is in ICE Custody. Where? The Government Just Stopped Telling You.
ICE Made 20,000 People Vanish From Its Website. Judges Made Some Reappear. Guess What You Can Do?
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,031: Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026
Picture this.
For three days you’ve been waiting for your brother to call from the detention center. He always calls. So you open the government’s own website, the one built in 2010 so families like yours wouldn’t have to beg phone operators for scraps, and you type in his name.
Nothing.
No facility. No city. No “transferred.” Just gone.
Is he in Texas? Louisiana? On a plane to a country he’s never set foot in? You don’t know. His lawyer doesn’t know. And the agency holding him won’t say.
I didn’t make that up to scare you. According to an Associated Press exclusive published September 21, 2026, that is exactly what’s happening right now to families across this country.
Here are the facts. Cold. Specific. Checkable.
On September 15, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly pulled detainees with final removal orders out of its online detainee locator.
No press release. No announcement. Three current and former ICE officials confirmed it to the AP. Lawyers confirmed their clients had vanished from the system. The American Immigration Lawyers Association had to warn its own members.
How many people are we talking about?
In July alone, nearly 16,000 people booked into ICE detention had final removal orders. That’s more than a third of all bookings that month.
ICE held more than 65,000 people as of early July, and the National Immigration Project’s legal director estimates around 30% of them likely have final orders.
Do the math. That’s nearly 20,000 human beings whose location the public can no longer look up.
When the AP asked ICE whether it did this…the agency wouldn’t confirm it. Wouldn’t deny it either.
Think about that. If you were proud of something…you’d say so.
“But Didn’t These People Already Get Their Day in Court?”
That’s the government’s argument.
The Department of Homeland Security says anyone with a final removal order has already received due process.
Here’s what they leave out.
“Final” isn’t the end of the road under the law. People can still ask to reopen their case. They can file a habeas petition…asking a federal judge to release them on constitutional grounds. And…federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering detainees released or given bond hearings.
Thousands.
ICE itself told the AP it faces a “historic number of injunctions” stopping individual removals.
So…read that again…slowly. Judges keep stepping in. And the response…is to make it harder for lawyers to find the very people judges might protect.
Some of these detainees have legal protection from being sent home…because they’d likely be tortured or persecuted. Many face removal to third countries…where they have no ties at all. A lawyer can’t file an emergency motion for a client…she can’t locate.
That’s not a glitch. That’s the design.
Here’s a detail that ought to make your blood boil.
Many of these final orders were issued because people missed a hearing.
The National Immigration Project…says the administration’s immigration courts… have made it harder…to participate in hearings…and harder…to reopen those cases afterward.
Make it harder to show up. Issue an order when they don’t. Then…hide them.
Michelle Mendez of the National Immigration Project called it “just another iteration of disappearing people.”
Greg Chen of AILA said families are “freaking out” because they think their loved one has already been deported.
Wouldn’t you?
The Tell
Want the most damning fact in the whole story?
The hiding doesn’t happen everywhere.
At the Adelanto facility in California…and at temporary holding sites in Minneapolis, New York City and suburban Chicago…detainees still show up in the locator. Why? Because judges ordered ICE to list them promptly…as part of lawsuits.
In other words…the only thing keeping names on that website…is somebody with power forcing the issue.
Where someone with authority said “show them,” ICE shows them. Where nobody did… people disappear.
Remember that. It’s the most important sentence in this article. Power only yields to power.
And…you have some.
Now Let Me Tell You What to Do With All That Anger
Being furious feels good for about ten minutes.
Then it curdles into that tired…helpless feeling…you get scrolling past the next outrage.
I don’t want you helpless. I want you useful.
On Tuesday, November 3, 2026…every seat in the U.S. House…and roughly a third of the Senate is on the ballot. Those are the people who fund ICE. Who write the laws governing it. Who can haul its leaders in front of a committee and ask, under oath, “Where are they?”
Governors…attorneys general…sheriffs…and county officials…are on many ballots too. Some decide whether local jails contract with ICE. Some file the kind of lawsuits that kept the Adelanto names visible.
This is where anger stops being a feeling…and becomes a lever.
But…here’s the part most people skip.
One vote is a whisper. Midterm turnout is historically lower than presidential turnout…which means…races get decided…by whoever bothers to show up. A few thousand votes have swung House seats. A few hundred have swung county offices.
So I’m not just asking you to vote.
I’m asking you to bring five people with you.
Not strangers. Your people. The cousin who “doesn’t do politics.” The coworker who grumbled about this story at lunch. The neighbor who just turned 18. Your mom. The best friend who always means to vote…and never quite gets around to it.
Here’s the plan. Specific, because vague plans die on the couch.
Tonight, write down five names. Real names, on real paper.
This week, text each one: “Are you registered? Check with me right now.” Send them to vote.gov. Registration deadlines in many states land in early October, so this cannot wait until “later.”
Next, pick the method and the day: early voting, mail ballot, or Election Day. Put it on their calendar and on yours.
Then go together. Drive them. Meet them there. Grab lunch after. People who make a concrete plan with a friend are far more likely to follow through.
Finally…ask each of your five to find five more.
Five becomes twenty-five. Twenty-five becomes a hundred and twenty-five. That’s not a slogan. That’s arithmetic.
One Last Thing
Somewhere tonight, a mother is typing her son’s name into a government website and staring at a blank screen.
She can’t make that system answer her.
You…can make the people who run it…answer to you.
Don’t whisper. Bring five.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. Don’t just nod and close this. Forward it to your five right now…before the feeling fades. The families searching that locator don’t get to “get around to it” later. Neither should we.
P.P.S. Can’t vote yourself? You can still bring five. Some of the most powerful people in any election are the ones who drive others to the polls.
Sources
Foley, Ryan J. “AP Exclusive: ICE hides locations of thousands of detainees with final removal orders.” Associated Press, via OPB, September 21, 2026.
Same AP report, alternate link: Houston Public Media
Deportation Data Project (U.C. Berkeley and UCLA), source of the July ICE booking data cited by AP
Vote.gov, for voter registration and state deadlines
A primal scream dies at my house. Shouting no a few times makes me feel better. But to you and everyone reminding us that it’s all about getting out the vote of everyone we know, thank you. This isn’t the election to sit out.
Jack - They didn't lose the paperwork. They built a hole and started feeding people into it — 20,000 human beings vanished from a database, on purpose, at night, hoping nobody with a press badge was watching. The GOP used to pretend the disappearing was metaphorical. Not anymore.
Eight men gone into Guantanamo like it's 2003 and we learned nothing. A green card holder "misplaced" on the way to a black site in Louisiana, and somehow that's not a scandal, it's a Tuesday. This isn't a database glitch. It's a policy, and it's working exactly as designed — lawyers can't find clients, families can't find sons, and nobody with a badge has to answer a single question about where a person went.
Feeling sick isn't a strategy. Here's the strategy.
Then stop stopping there. Find three people in your life who aren't registered and get them registered yourself — sit next to them, walk them through it, don't just send a link and hope. If they don't have a way to get to the polls or an early-vote site, be the way. Offer the ride. Put it on your calendar now, not on election day when it's too late to plan.
Call your county or state Democratic Party and ask how to become a precinct captain or an election committee volunteer. Every county org is short-staffed and they will put you to work within a week. Ask specifically about canvassing — most state parties run their walk lists through Minivan (VAN's door-knocking app); get trained on it and start knocking doors of registered Dems who haven't voted in a cycle or two. That list exists. Somebody just has to walk it.
This is the antidote to the locator story, not a separate issue from it. They're betting that outrage stays online and turns into nothing. Every door you knock, every ride you give, every neighbor you get registered is you refusing to be the version of this they're counting on.
Go be inconvenient to them. Start today.