Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are unable to locate any records of illegal immigrants taken into custody and placed in a federal program to “ensure non-detained non-citizen compliance with release conditions, court hearings, and final orders of removal,” according to a nonprofit government transparency advocacy group.
“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 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in a Dec. 22 letter.
The ICE letter cautioned that the failure to locate records sought by TRAC isn’t evidence that the documents do or don’t exist. The inability of ICE to locate the requested records was described by TRAC in a Dec. 23 statement as a “very troubling development.”