Where They Take People: How a Family Finds Someone ICE Has Taken

Almost every story on this page begins the same way. Someone leaves the house — for work, for a school drop-off, for an appointment they were told to keep — and does not come back. The next hour belongs to whoever is still at home, and it is spent on one question that nobody has rehearsed: where is he?

This site has now carried enough of those hours to answer it honestly. The answer is not one place. It is a county jail an hour up the highway, a detention center two states away, sometimes a building that appears on no public list at all. Here is what the verified record shows, and what a household can do this week so that nobody has to start that search from nothing.

Where people have actually ended up

A county jail in the next county. The Springfield, Ohio residents this page has followed since August are not in Springfield. Fada Bereus, 47, has been held about a month in the Butler County Jail, roughly an hour’s drive from the apartment on East Main Street where ICE took him on Aug. 18 as he came home from work. The Dayton Daily News reached him there by phone, through a translator, on Sept. 15. Elisthene Petit Kat and Pastor Joubert Adrien were taken in the same city. A county jail holding people for ICE is the commonest first stop in the record this site keeps.

A detention center in another state. Pastor Molis Augustave was stopped in West Manchester Township, Pennsylvania, for a burned-out headlight. He is now in a detention center in Louisiana — more than a thousand miles from his congregation, his wife and the York County road where the stop happened. Distance is not an accident of the system; it is a feature of it, and it is the reason a family’s paperwork has to travel faster than the person does.

A building nobody will confirm. On Sept. 15, lawyers for New Jersey and Roxbury Township told a federal judge in Newark that they had learned of reports that a warehouse on Route 46 — the building the state sued over in March, after Homeland Security bought it to convert into a 1,500-bed detention center — had been used in connection with immigration enforcement, and that they are investigating whether that violated the court’s earlier order. “If they determine that Defendants have not complied with the stipulated order, Plaintiffs will seek appropriate relief from the Court,” the state’s lawyers wrote. In the same filing, the federal government said it has still not decided whether to convert the warehouse, and has no timeline for deciding.

The claim that people were actually held there comes from an activist coalition, Project No ICE North Jersey Alliance, and it is their account, not a finding: their attorney, David Broderick, says a man arrested in Dover on Sept. 4 told a relative he was driven west and left at what seemed to be a jail, and that members have recorded blacked-out SUVs entering the warehouse after raids nearby. “It’s not perfect evidence,” Broderick told The Jersey Vindicator. “But it’s the best evidence we’ve had so far.” A spokesperson for Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said the office is “carefully reviewing reports of ICE activity at the warehouse and will take all necessary steps to address any non-compliance with a court order.” Neither ICE nor Homeland Security answered reporters’ questions about it.

Take from that only what it is worth, which is this: if you cannot find your person in an official system on the first day, that is not proof of anything — not that they are gone, and not that they are fine. It is a reason to keep looking and to write down everything you know.

Once they are in, how long it lasts

Two cases on this page, both verified, point in opposite directions, and the difference between them is not luck.

On Sept. 11 this page carried the man who was stopped on his way to work and was in Haiti roughly six weeks later. On Sept. 15, Homeland Security published its own account of another case: a man ICE arrested in Boston on Jan. 22, 2025, whom an immigration judge ordered removed in November 2025 and who was flown to Haiti on Sept. 10, 2026 — nineteen months after the arrest, in continuous custody for all of it.

What separates six weeks from nineteen months is mostly what was already in the file and what a lawyer was able to file after. Neither number is a promise to anyone else. The useful part is the sequence the government printed itself: an immigration judge’s order came first, and the removal came after it. Losing TPS is not that order. It never was, and the government’s own paperwork in the loudest case it chose to publicize this month says so by implication.

Length is its own hazard. In New Jersey on Tuesday, Gabriela Soto stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center with faith leaders and asked for her husband’s release. Martín Alonso Soto Hernandez has been in immigration custody since February, moved from Delaney Hall in Newark to Elizabeth in May, and his family says he has spent roughly two months isolated from other detainees. The family asked his deportation officer for discretionary release during a pregnancy loss and was refused. “It is draining him mentally. It is draining me mentally. It is draining our daughter,” she said. That is one family’s account of one case — and it is also the reason the practical advice below is about paperwork done in advance, not about what to do on the day.

What has not changed

TPS for Haiti and Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026. We re-read the USCIS page on Sept. 16: it is still stamped Sept. 9 and says exactly that. The Federal Register carries no new TPS notice for any country, and nothing is sitting on public inspection.

Your rights have not changed either. You do not have to open your door unless an officer shows you a warrant signed by a judge, with your name and address on it. You do not have to answer questions about where you were born or how you entered. You do not have to sign anything — a signature can give away a hearing you would otherwise have had — and you should not sign anything you have not read with a lawyer. Those are on the know your rights page in all three languages, in a form you can print.

One more thing that has not changed, though the headlines this week might suggest otherwise: the new Homeland Security public charge rule still takes effect Friday, Sept. 18. On Sept. 14 the attorney general of New York, joined by more than 20 other states and the District of Columbia, sued to have it declared unlawful and thrown out. A lawsuit is not a pause. Until a court says otherwise, the rule arrives on Friday — and it does not change who is eligible for any benefit, and does not apply to a TPS application or re-registration. Do not drop food help or health coverage your family is legally entitled to before you talk to an immigration lawyer.

Five things to do this week

1. Write the A-number down and give it to someone outside your house. It is the nine-digit number on any notice USCIS or the immigration court has sent. With it, a relative can search for a detained person and speak to a facility; without it, the first hours go to reconstructing it. Keep a photo of the document on a phone that stays home.
2. Learn the search before you need it. The page on finding someone detained walks through the official locator and what to do when a name does not come up — including calling the local ICE field office and the county jails nearby, which is where several of the people on this page were found.
3. Put a lawyer’s number in your own phone, not only in a relative’s. Start at find legal help. If you are the one taken, the number in your pocket is the only one you have.
4. Name a stand-in adult in writing at your child’s school and day care, and check that the office has it on the pickup list. In San Diego on Sept. 11, a Head Start program followed exactly that written procedure and released a 2-year-old to the family’s named emergency contact the same afternoon, after her father was detained at the gate.
5. Report what you see, and keep a copy. If ICE activity happens where you live, the report ICE page takes the details, and the letter tool produces a written record for a lawyer or an elected official. A written account made the same week is worth far more than a memory six months later.

None of this stops an arrest. What it does is shorten the worst hours to a phone call and a number, instead of a family driving from jail to jail. Losing TPS is not a deportation order — and being hard to find is not the same as being beyond reach.