Inadequate recordkeeping is not just a bureaucratic failure

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OPINION – This week in Chicago, immigration officers stopped 60-year-old Rueben Antonio Cruz, a Salvadoran man with heart problems, and fined him for not carrying his immigration papers. This demand for paper proof on a city sidewalk is a part of a larger crisis in immigration recordkeeping. While immigrants are being punished for missing documents, federal agencies routinely lose, redact, or withhold theirs.

While we often focus on the threat of being located, detained, and physically disappeared, a different kind of disappearance is becoming increasingly common: being digitally erased and rendered untraceable by the very systems meant to manage immigration.

The absence or withholding of vital records such as case files, court documents, and detention logs by ICE has become a pattern rather than an anomaly. And even when records exist, if no one can access them, they might as well not exist at all.

In March, Franco Caraballo, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, was deported to El Salvador after being accused, without substantiating evidence, of gang affiliation. His physical disappearance was followed by a digital one: his name vanished from ICE’s online detainee locator. Ricardo Prada Vásquez, like 698 other immigrants, never appear in ICE’s system at all; they simply disappear.

More recently, at ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ a state-run facility in Florida, roughly 800 detainees could not be located using ICE’s public tool. By the end of September, the facilities population had fallen to under 400, with no record of what had happened to the hundreds no longer housed there.

Without immigration records, people cannot appeal decisions, access case files, or prove their right to be in the country. In these situations, individuals are effectively denied due process. Immigrants without traceable documentation also lose access to healthcare, education, housing, and legal protections. They cannot renew DACA. They are erased from official histories and public health data.

ICE’s data reporting has been so poor that the February 2024 recommendations from the American Immigration Council to “improve” transparency mostly just urged the agency to release the reports it is already obligated to provide. The same report highlighted how many detention facility contracts remain hidden, how published contracts omit critical modifications, and how ICE often redacts documents without citing the legal exemptions required by law.

ICE’s handling of data goes far beyond missing contracts. It shows a broader pattern of leaving out, misreporting, or hiding important information. In its first public report after President Trump’s second term began, the agency left out required data on transgender people in detention. ICE also deletes and replaces its biweekly detention reports online, instead of keeping past versions available for public reference. The agency has even withheld basic details about how many beds each detention facility is supposed to hold and the actual number of people detained.

In one case, an asylum seeker had to file a lawsuit just to get access to her own records. When the documents were finally released, they showed missing medical files, no record of a fire at a facility that had been reported in the news, and even an admission that ICE sometimes tries to deport people who aren’t legally deportable.

When ICE’s data is released, it is riddled with errors. Between 2021 and 2022, the agency repeatedly published outdated or misleading information, including reports that undercounted tens of thousands of individuals in alternatives to detention programs. Some releases omitted entire categories, such as mandatory detainees, or were more than a year out of date. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit revealed ICE failed to include at least 203,350 individuals in their publicly reported “initial book-in” detention figures from 2019 to 2022; this is around 42% of the true total.

Even when records do exist, accessing them is entirely different question given the systemic undermining of the agencies responsible for FOIA requests and the historic untimeliness of the USCIS in providing records. Even having the records is still not enough: the ACLU reported that lawyers cannot even get faxed documents or emails to their clients because the documents are lost or confiscated in violation of ICE’s own policies.

Inadequate recordkeeping is not just a bureaucratic failure. It is a moral evasion, a means by which a nation permits itself to forget. It allows society to look away, to unsee suffering, to unhear the cries of the children it displaced. And that is precisely why we must refuse the comfort of forgetting. We must insist on bearing witness not only to what the government records, but to what it omits, obscures, and erases.

Annie K. Lamar is an assistant professor of Computational Classics and, by courtesy, of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.