When Someone Stops Answering: The Search, in the Order That Works

On the afternoon of Aug. 26, a family in Newberg, Oregon drove to the immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington to visit their father. A staff member at the front desk looked him up and told his daughter-in-law that he “isn’t in the system anymore” — that he had been released. She asked what that meant. The answer, she says, was: “He could have been deported, transferred or let go.”

He had not been released. Juan Miguel Aldape was on a plane to Louisiana. It took the family another day at the same front desk to learn that, and an ICE database to confirm where he had landed: the Richwood Correctional Center, roughly 2,300 miles from his house. His family told the Oregon Capital Chronicle this week that they have not spoken to him since Aug. 26.

That family is not Haitian, and their story never mentions TPS. It is the opening of this article because the sequence they went through is the same sequence Springfield, Danbury, Indianapolis and York families have described on this page since the beginning of August, and because their week contains the single most useful correction we can offer anyone reading this: being told that a person is “not in the system” is not news that he is free.

What the record actually shows about looking for someone

Put the last six weeks of verified reporting side by side and a shape appears.

Transfers are fast. On Aug. 27, NBC4 reported that a Springfield pastor detained on a Tuesday had already been moved out of Ohio by Wednesday afternoon. Aldape went from a Portland processing center to Tacoma in one day and to Louisiana within a week. The practical meaning is not subtle: the facility where someone was taken is often not the facility where they are, and the gap opens in about a day.

Rosters are incomplete. In late August the Springfield News-Sun counted arrests by hand from Butler County Jail bookings and reported that one Aug. 13 arrest it knew about did not appear in the county’s records at all. The Haitian Times, documenting 27 people detained or processed in a single week in Springfield, said plainly how it got there: the county jail roster, ICE’s online detainee locator, eyewitness accounts, and follow-up calls to relatives, attorneys and advocates. Four sources, because no one of them was enough.

Nobody is going to call you. Asked directly, in August, for a count of Haitians arrested in Springfield, DHS and ICE declined to give one — “DHS does not discuss ongoing or future operations.” There is no list coming. There is no notification system that reaches families first. The Aldapes learned where their father was by checking a database themselves.

And the counts you see in the news are floors, not rosters. This page has now carried four different figures for detentions in one Ohio city in the space of six days, from four different people counting four different things. A number going down does not mean anyone came home; it means someone else was counting. Yesterday’s deportation flight to Cap-Haïtien is the same lesson in miniature: Haitian authorities were told before takeoff that as many as 78 people might be aboard, and after it landed a coordinator at Haiti’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Associated Press that 101 people were on it. One flight. Two numbers. Neither of them is a passenger list, and no official has said whether anyone aboard had ever held TPS.

The search, in the order that works

This is not legal advice and it is not a guarantee. It is the order that the families and reporters in the stories above actually used, arranged so that the fastest and free things come first.

1. Write down what you already know, before you start calling. Full legal name exactly as it appears on their documents, date of birth, country of birth, and their A-number if you have ever seen one — it is on work permits, court notices and most immigration paperwork, and it is the single field that makes every government system work. If you cannot find it, look for their I-94, their CBP One appointment record, or any letter from immigration court. Take photographs of all of it now, on your phone, and send copies to one person outside your household.

2. Search ICE’s online detainee locator. It is free, at locator.ice.gov, and it works two ways: by A-number and country of birth, or by full name, country of birth and date of birth. Spelling matters, and names get entered wrong — try the name with and without a middle name, and try the surname alone if the system allows it. Do this the first night. Do not wait a week to see if they come home.

3. Search it again tomorrow, and the day after. This is the step people skip and the one that matters most. A person can be missing from the locator for the first hours after an arrest, and can move between facilities repeatedly in the first week. Write down the facility and the date every single time you check, in a notebook or a note on your phone. That written record is what a lawyer needs, and it is the only evidence you will have of a transfer.

4. Call the county jail, but do not stop there. In Ohio, several county jails hold people for ICE under contract, and a local jail roster is public. But treat what a jail or a detention center tells you as one data point, not an answer — the Aldape family was told “released” by a front desk when the truth was “in transit to Louisiana.”

5. If they have ever had a case in immigration court, check it. The Justice Department’s automated line, 1-800-898-7180, is free, toll-free and answers 24 hours a day against an A-number; the same information is at acis.eoir.justice.gov. It returns the next hearing date, a judge’s decision and appeal information. Three limits, and all three matter: the phone line answers in English and Spanish only, so have someone sit with you who can interpret; the system shows only the most recent case, and the court’s mailed documents are the only official record; and a person who has never had a case in immigration court will find nothing there, which is not bad news. Most people reading this are not in proceedings at all.

6. Get a lawyer looking the moment the location moves out of state. Free and low-cost legal help is on our help page. Be honest with yourself about what that help can and cannot be right now: a Legal Aid immigration attorney in Ohio told The Haitian Times this week that her organization gives advice and referrals but is not currently taking new cases for full representation in removal proceedings, and a community-network board member said these groups can refer you to an attorney, not promise you one. Start early anyway, and ask every organization on the list, not just the first.

What has not changed

Everything above is about a bad week. None of it changes the things this site has said since July, and a frightened person should reread them now rather than later.

Losing TPS is not a deportation order. It ended a status. It is not a judge telling you personally to leave, and it is not a warrant. If an immigration judge has already ordered your removal, that is a separate and real situation — see a lawyer about it this week — but that is not most people, and it is not something that happened to anyone on July 27.

You do not have to open your door. An administrative form signed by an ICE officer is not a judge’s warrant. Ask them to slide it under the door and read the signature line. Reporters in Springfield watched agents leave an apartment after about an hour because nobody answered. What to do at the door and in a traffic stop is the page to read tonight, out loud, with everyone in your house.

And do the thing that needs no lawyer, no money and no status. Asked what people needed most, that same Ohio attorney named it: a plan for your family in case a parent is picked up. Who collects the children. Who holds the documents. Who gets called first, and what they are supposed to do. Our family plan tools walk through it, and it takes an evening.

The Aldape family’s week is instructive precisely because they did everything right and it was still slow, confusing and cruel. They called. They drove. They were told something false at a counter. They kept checking anyway, and that is how they found him. If someone you love has stopped answering tonight, that is the whole method: start searching, write down what you find, check again tomorrow, and do not accept a single sentence from a single desk as the end of the search.

If today is unbearable for you, 988 answers 24 hours a day. Press 2 for Spanish; for other languages, say the name of the language you need and an interpreter is connected by voice — it takes about 20 seconds, and it works on calls, not texts. Haitian Creole is not named on the line’s own site, so have someone sit with you if you can.