ICE Says It Can’t Find Records On Nearly 400,000 Illegal Immigrants It Should Be Monitoring

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “no records” Many thousands illegal immigrants It was released into the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security agency made its admission in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). TRAC had requested information on 377,980 illegal immigrants in ICE’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“ICE has conducted a search of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for records responsive to your request and no records responsive to your request were found,” the agency responded to TRAC’s FOIA.

The ICE ATD program was created to ensure that migrant compliance with court orders and avoid physical detention. The agency monitors the movement of migrants via GPS tracking and cell phone or ankle monitors. It also conducts mandatory check-ins at case agents. This program was established in 2004 in order to free up space at detention centers, while migrants wait to be processed in the crowded immigration courts.

“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in [ATD] that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher explained to the DCNF

Kocher posted the following social media message on Tuesday: “Just days after announcing that the agency had been misleading to the public for months about how many immigrants were on gps ankle monitors, @icegov claims it can’t find records on over 350,000 immigrants in alternatives to detention program.”

Just days after the announcement that the agency had misled the public for months about the number of immigrants using gps ankle monitors by the agency, @icegov claims it can’t find records on over 350,000 immigrants in alternatives to detention program.https://t.co/UVzYiyklLG pic.twitter.com/mAJKz9UfPw

— Austin Kocher, PhD (@ackocher) December 28, 2022

ICE issued an apology earlier in the month for underreporting the number of illegal immigrants that it released to the public without electronic surveillance (e.g. an ankle bracelet) by more than 18,000%.

“Upon further inspection of what participants were provided against what was publicly available online, it became clear there was a data miscalculation. Teams worked quickly to address and reconcile the issue, now updated on ICE.gov. We regret ICE provided erroneous ATD enrollment data and worked to resolve the miscalculation going forward,” An ICE spokesperson spoke to the DCNF.

ICE had reported on its website that 266 illegal migrants had been released from the agency’s custody with no electronic surveillance as of November. ICE was present at a Washington, D.C., event on December 1, 2018. told Participants included high-ranking agency officials and heads of advocacy groups. They learned that it actually released 49,459 illegal migrants without electronic surveillance.

Illegal immigration to the U.S. continues its upward trend at the southern border. Data released by the Department of Homeland Security last week showed that November was the most successful month for illegal immigration to the United States. The data showed The authorities apprehended around 60,000 migrants more than in the previous year, 233 740 of them. November 2021.