You Cannot Represent Someone You Cannot Find

Nowhere in any of this does anyone say the words "you may not have a lawyer." Nobody has to.

This post reflects the author’s personal views and is not legal advice.

There is a public tool called the Online Detainee Locator System. You type in a name, a date of birth, and a country of birth, or an A-number and a country of birth, and it is supposed to tell you where ICE is holding someone. It is the front door. It is the thing we tell families to check before they call us, because it is free and it is fast and it does not require an attorney.

It is also, more and more often, empty.

People who are in custody do not show up. People who showed up yesterday are gone today. A family gives me a name and a birthday and a country and I get nothing back, and then I have to explain to a mother that the absence of a result does not mean her son is free. It means the system does not have him, or does not have him the way she spelled his name, or has him under a different date of birth that someone typed wrong at intake, or has him in a facility that has not reported yet. The locator was never built to be complete. It only covers adults, only covers people currently in ICE custody, and it does not cover the hours or days when someone is in transit or being held by someone else on ICE’s behalf. Those gaps used to be footnotes. Now they are the experience.

So we do it the hard way. We call facilities. We call the local field office. We call the other local field office. We ask other attorneys in group chats at eleven at night whether anyone has seen a transfer bus go to a particular county jail. We are running a missing persons operation with no database, and we are doing it on the clock, while deadlines run.

I have written before about what it takes to get a signature from a detained client. That post was about one form. This is about the layer underneath it, which is that before you can fight about the signature, you have to know where the person is.

A routine medical exam took a full day of lawyering.

I had a client who needed a routine medical exam outside the facility. Not surgery. Not an emergency. A scheduled, ordinary exam that any of us would book on a phone app in ninety seconds. I went roughly ten rounds between ICE and the medical provider to make it happen. Each side told me the other side had to initiate. Each side had a rule that the other side’s rule made impossible. Nobody was hostile. Nobody said no. It simply took a full day of an attorney’s time to accomplish a thing that should have taken one phone call, and the only reason it happened at all is that my client had a lawyer with the room to spend a day on it.

Another client has moved every twenty four to forty eight hours.

He was detained late last week and has not stopped moving since. Every move resets everything. I cannot submit a request to contact him at a facility he has already left. I cannot plan for bond, because what the law even allows on bond depends on which federal circuit he is sitting in, and he keeps changing circuits. A man’s odds are being reshuffled by a transport schedule that nobody will explain to me. There is no notice. There is no forwarding address. I find out where he was by learning where he is not.

And then there are the meetings. We schedule a legal visit or a call, we build the day around it, the client builds his week around it, and it moves or vanishes minutes beforehand with no reason given. Not once. Routinely. If a court did that to a lawyer, it would be a scandal. In detention it is Tuesday.

Denial by attrition.

Put all of this in one pile and look at what it adds up to. Nowhere in any of it does anyone say the words “you may not have a lawyer.” Nobody has to. If the locator does not find you, if you move before mail reaches you, if your attorney’s visit can be cancelled without explanation, if a signature is a favor and a medical exam is a negotiation, then the right to counsel is technically intact and practically gone. That is the part I want people to understand. Access to counsel is not denied by announcement. It is denied by attrition.

I am not claiming this is coordinated. I want to be precise about that, because precision matters and because the truth is worse than a conspiracy. This is what happens when you combine incompetence, understaffing, no transparency, no consequences for any of it, and an underlying attitude that immigrants are not really entitled to the ordinary things, including a lawyer. A coordinated attack can be exposed and stopped. This cannot, because there is nothing to expose. There is only a thousand small failures that each have a plausible excuse and that together make representation nearly impossible.

The cost is showing up in who is left to do the work.

The labor on a detained case is so extreme, and so unpredictable, that attorneys I respect have capped the number of detained cases they will take, or stopped taking them entirely. These are not people who lost their nerve. They are people who did the math. When one client can consume a week of your practice because nobody will tell you what county he is in, you either cap the work or you lose the firm. Every one of those caps is a detained person somewhere who calls around and finds nobody.

What would actually help, and none of it is radical.

A detainee locator that is accurate, that updates in real time, and that records transfers with the receiving facility and the date.

Notice to counsel of record before a transfer, not after, and a rule that a pending bond matter travels with the person.

One point of contact per facility with authority to schedule medical care and legal visits, instead of two entities each pointing at the other.

Cancelled legal visits documented with a reason and rescheduled within a set number of days.

That is a list of administrative housekeeping. It is not a constitutional amendment. The fact that we do not have it is the answer to the question of whether anyone with power considers this a problem.

If you are a family member reading this.

If the locator comes back empty, that does not mean your person is free and it does not mean they are lost. Write down every spelling of the name, the exact date of birth, the country of birth, and the A-number if you have it. Write down the date and place they were taken. Then call a lawyer, and call one fast, because the first seventy two hours are when a person is hardest to find and the easiest to move. Our detention resources page is a place to start.

We are still taking detained cases. I want to be able to keep saying that.

Slatton & Hass Immigration Advocates is a Maryland-based immigration firm serving clients nationwide. This post reflects the author’s personal views, is general information rather than legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.