By Ruth Simon, Elizabeth Findell and Tarini Parti
When immigration lawyers sought to defend a North Texas construction worker detained in early March, they couldn't find him.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement records initially showed that Felix Morales Reyna, a 28-year-old Mexican father, was in Alvarado, Texas, 30 miles south of his home in Fort Worth, paralegal Andrea Avila said. But he was actually more than 200 miles north in Cushing, Okla. By the time her firm found Morales, he had been moved to Aurora, Colo. -- but his case had inexplicably moved to Anson, Texas.
Over three months, as Morales was shuttled through detention centers in Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico and California, his family and lawyers say they received no notice. His legal case bounced through at least three jurisdictions different from his physical location.
"You'd file a bond motion and it would just get rejected as 'We don't have jurisdiction over that case,'" said Avila, adding that she refiled the bond motion 20 times.
Frequent transfers between detention centers, across the country or to multiple locations in a few days, have become commonplace in the second Trump administration, according to more than a dozen immigration lawyers across the country. They describe a trend where their clients are disappearing into an opaque and labyrinthine system that is obstructing their ability to defend themselves in court.
While some immigrant advocacy groups complained of increasing detainee transfers under the Biden administration, the transfers now are accelerated, and a departure from a longstanding ICE policy to limit long-distance moves.
Legal questions around the issue remain unsettled. Many immigrant advocates say the transfers amount to denying a Constitutional right to due process, as they often place detainees far from their families and legal counsel, sometimes where they cannot access mandatory court hearings or even be located.
The Trump administration says such concerns are overblown. "ICE does not 'disappear' people," said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. "The appropriate process due to an illegal alien with final deportation orders is removal, plain and simple, " she said, adding, "That said, DHS has a stringent law enforcement assessment in place that abides by due process under the U.S. Constitution."
Some attorneys acknowledge that occasional moves are inevitable as detention centers have started to become overcrowded, but say their distance and frequency is unprecedented and illogical.
"They happen abruptly, they happen overnight," said Eloa Celedon, a Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer, adding that this happens in about half her cases.
Data collected by Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate who tracks ICE flights, shows that domestic flights by the agency -- including flights from the border to detention centers and between facilities -- are higher now than they were at any point since he started recording them in 2020, despite fewer people crossing the border. The agency flew 727 domestic legs in July, up from an average of 350 a month during the Biden administration.
The high rate of transfers is part of the Department of Homeland Security's strategy to release as few detainees as possible as they await deportation, according to people familiar with the operations. With a near-record 58,000 in ICE detention, some need to be transferred to keep up with space constraints, these people said. At the same time, they noted, growing pressure on regional ICE leadership has made the system increasingly chaotic and dysfunctional, resulting in unnecessary transfers.
The administration's desire to have migrants self-deport is also a factor, the people familiar with ICE's operations said. Making the legal process as grueling as possible could force detainees to ultimately sign paperwork forgoing their court case and agreeing to deportation. ICE officials have been aggressively pushing detainees to sign at detention centers, lawyers said.
Many of the transfers have been from liberal states, where judges have been more lenient, to states where judges have more frequently denied bond, lawyers said.
Those states, including Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, are also home to 14 of the country's 20 largest detention centers, according to TRAC, a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the University of Syracuse. In other cases, lawyers have flagged clients' removal to remote sites or rural county jails.
The Department of Homeland Security denied it has ulterior motives for the transfers. "Any allegations that ICE is transferring illegal aliens to make the legal process as grueling as possible are false," said McLaughlin.
"Once an alien is transferred to ICE custody, the agency makes a custody determination based on bed space and ensures their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the U.S," McLaughlin said. Detainees have opportunities to communicate with family members and attorneys, she said.
The frequent moves and lengthy hold times are adding to the stresses for family members worried about deteriorating conditions at increasingly crowded detention centers. ICE is on track to have its deadliest year on record, according to government statistics, with 11 deaths since January.
Avila, the paralegal whose firm refiled a bond motion 20 times on behalf of Morales, initially expected him to quickly receive bond. Morales, who intended to apply for asylum after fleeing violence in his native state of Guerrero, had no criminal record. He'd been complying with immigration check-ins since crossing the border last year with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, Avila said.
The firm's lead lawyer, Michael Piri, said he is working with developers to create an app with a panic button that will automatically transmit his clients' locations if they are detained, so that he will at least initially know where they are.
Morales finally received a court date for a remote hearing to consider bond, but missed it because officials at the Oklahoma facility said they couldn't access the court link, Avila said. On a second attempt, employees said the detention center had no internet.
During his months in detention, Morales's lawyers were never allowed a call to him, Avila said. Their only contact with him was through his wife.
"It was desperate because they moved him from one place to another and they didn't accept the lawyers' requests," his wife, Cielo Gomez, said. "We came here for safety and nothing more."
Ultimately, the tactics caused Morales to stay in custody long enough for a change in policy to go into effect barring him from bond at all, Avila said.
"Any allegation by the media that ICE weaponized transfers against criminal illegal alien Felix Yair Morales Reyna and prevented him from attending court or talking to his lawyer are FALSE," said McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman. She noted that he was referred to ICE in the course of an FBI investigation into drug dealing. Morales wasn't charged, according to DHS records, and was removed to Mexico in mid-July.
Detainees are entitled to legal representation, but don't have the right to free counsel if they can't afford an attorney, as is true in criminal proceedings. Cases raising due-process issues are making their way through the courts, often over whether the administration can invoke the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to subject some immigrants to expedited removal, as well as for other reasons.
In general, being released on bond has been more difficult in immigration cases, which can make it tougher for detainees to gather evidence for an asylum claim. Interim guidance issued by the Trump administration in July seeks to make millions of immigrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexican border ineligible for bond, regardless of how long they have been in the U.S.
"There are many immigration judges that disagree with that and set bond, " said Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
DHS is routinely blocking the ability of those immigrants to post bond while the government appeals the courts' decisions, he said, a process that can stretch for months.
Questions regarding access to counsel are continuing to arise in legal challenges to Trump administration detention policies and the opening of new facilities that limit detainees' access to their lawyers.
"There are areas where the law is unsettled and it is unsettling," said Anne Schaufele, an assistant professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia. "We operate on this fiction that ICE detention is civil in nature and shouldn't require the same Eighth Amendment protections we have in the criminal context against cruel and unusual punishment."
In Florida, agents arrested Dante Lopez, a Peruvian with no criminal record and three children who are U.S. citizens, at gunpoint at his Coral Springs home in February. Lopez first entered the U.S. in 1993 with his parents, who unsuccessfully filed for asylum, and was issued a deportation letter in 1999. He re-entered the country without permission in 2011 because he feared for his life, said his lawyer, Yoel Lemus.
After a stint at a state prison, Lopez was moved to the Krome North Servicing Processing Center, an ICE facility in Miami, and then to another one in Pompano Beach, Fla.
Lopez was on the phone with his family in April, when he learned he would be moving again. The family notified Lemus, his lawyer, who was able to rush to the Pompano Beach facility. But agents wouldn't allow him to see his client, Lemus said, initially directing him to a waiting room and later telling him Lopez was already shackled, on a bus.
"They took him from right under my nose to an undisclosed location," Lemus said. He later learned Lopez has been moved across the country to an ICE facility in San Diego.
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August 06, 2025 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
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