How does Freedom for Immigrants define and document an “enforced disappearance” in ICE custody?
Executive summary
Freedom for Immigrants (FFI) defines an “enforced disappearance” in ICE custody by invoking the United Nations framing—that disappearance occurs when a state or its agents refuse to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty—and documents it through interviews, surveys and case-tracking that trace gaps between people taken into custody and what public systems and officials acknowledge [1]. FFI’s 2021 report catalogs 698 such cases in ICE custody between 2017 and 2021, documents systemic failures of the ICE Locator and communication breakdowns with families and consulates, and situates its findings amid broader critiques from other advocacy groups [1] [2] [3].
1. What FFI means by “enforced disappearance”
FFI adopts the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ core element of enforced disappearance—most centrally the “refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty”—and applies that standard to U.S. immigration detention when ICE or related actors obscure a person’s whereabouts from family, counsel and oversight bodies [1]. FFI’s public materials make clear the organization treats the pattern of non‑transparency, prolonged absence from public databases, and failures to notify consulates as the functional equivalent of enforced disappearance under international norms even though the United States has not ratified the UN Convention on enforced disappearances [1].
2. How FFI documents cases: methods and sources
FFI’s report and toolkit say the organization relies on surveys, interviews with people in detention and their loved ones, continued communications from inside facilities, and systematic case-tracking to build its dataset—methods intended to capture disappearances that public records do not reflect [1]. The group cross-references family reports against ICE tools such as the Online Detainee Locator System and other federal searches, and compiles unresolved instances where detainees are absent from public locators or where families report long delays or misinformation [1] [2] [4].
3. The ICE Locator as the central evidentiary gap
FFI singles out the ICE Locator as the practical mechanism whose failures produce disappearances: by policy a person in ICE custody should appear in the Locator within eight hours of entry, but FFI and partner organizations document repeated failures to update or to accurately reflect transfers and releases, which blocks access to lawyers, monitors and consular assistance [2] [1]. FFI’s case work shows that when the Locator is wrong or silent, people can be effectively unreachable for days, weeks or longer—situations the organization counts as enforced disappearances when corroborated by interviews and other records [1] [2].
4. Scale and unresolved cases FFI reports
Using its methodology, FFI reported 698 enforced disappearances in ICE custody from 2017 to 2021 and emphasized that dozens of those cases remained unresolved at the time of publication, a tally presented as evidence of a pattern rather than isolated errors [1]. FFI pairs that case count with mapping and facility-tracking tools—its detention map of more than 200 facilities and contract data—to show how opacity is built into a sprawling detention system [5] [1].
5. Corroboration, critique and alternative claims
FFI’s findings are echoed by allied groups like the American Friends Service Committee, which documents database failures and the way facilities can make people “untraceable,” strengthening FFI’s argument that systemic problems—not just clerical errors—produce disappearances [3]. By contrast, ICE’s public stance insists everyone in its custody is accounted for via the Online Detainee Locator System and that detainees receive due process, a position that FFI directly disputes through its case-level evidence [6]. FFI’s reliance on testimonial and tracking methods has the strength of capturing what official databases omit, but it also depends on sources inside a system that by FFI’s own account is secretive—an inherent tension in documenting institutional opacity [1] [2].
6. What FFI recommends implicitly through its documentation practice
Through documentation, advocacy materials and practical toolkits that tell families to contact consulates and use federal search mechanisms, FFI signals that fixing disappearances requires both better official accounting—timely, accurate locator updates and consular notifications—and independent monitoring that can hold agencies to account [2] [4]. The organization’s framing of these incidents as “enforced disappearances” deliberately elevates them from administrative failures to human‑rights violations to catalyze legal, diplomatic and public pressure, even as the U.S. has not acceded to the international convention that codifies the term [1].