ICE Doesn’t Notify Family Members When it Transfers Detainees. This Democrat Wants to Change That.

Democratic Rep. Luz Rivas is pushing for the Trump administration to provide more information every time it moves migrants in U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody between detention facilities.

The California lawmaker introduced legislation that would compel ICE to notify family members when detainees are transferred, but it’s a long shot in the Republican-controlled House. Her focus on this issue reflects broader Democratic frustration with the Trump administration’s lack of transparency as it carries out its immigration agenda.

“Current law does not require ICE to notify family when the detainee is transferred. The only instance that ICE will even notify the family is in the case of death of the detainee,” Rivas told NOTUS. “I don’t think that’s right, and that’s what led me to introduce the INFORM Act.”

The issue hits close to home for Rivas, who has constituents held at the Adelanto Detention Center, where she’s made frequent visits in her time in Congress. She said that on the times she’s been allowed to visit, she discovered that some of the constituents she expected to see had been transferred to a different state without any notification.

One case in particular inspired Rivas’ legislation: that of 18 year-old Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz, who was arrested by federal immigration officers while walking his dog in Los Angeles in August. When the soon-to-be high school senior was detained, his family had no idea where he was. In the weeks that followed, ICE moved him from the Adelanto facility in San Bernardino County to another holding site across state lines in Arizona, without notifying his family.

“They found the dog in the neighborhood walking alone because it was just left outside, and I think that’s when the family found out that he was even taken,” Rivas told NOTUS of Guerrero-Cruz’s case. “I hear these stories all the time from constituents that it’s like a kidnapping. You don’t know where your family is, who took them and why. Initially they don’t have that identification number to locate them and track them down.”

Rivas has followed this case closely. On Wednesday, she said she attended Guerrero-Cruz’s latest immigration hearing to observe and “assure his family that we’re doing everything we can for him.”

Guerrero-Cruz was first moved to Arizona and was in the process of being relocated again to Louisiana when he was taken off a plane on the tarmac and sent back to California, said Rivas. She told NOTUS that she visited Adelanto on the days Guerrero-Cruz was transferred to and from Adelanto to demand information about his transfer. She said she was told that the transfer was based on bed availability in specific centers.

“The answers I got at that time were that it’s all determined by the number of beds that are available at detention centers. So I was like if that was the case, then why is he back here? It’s because there was always a bed for him here,” Rivas said. “So it just seems intentional to me, the way they do things. Not just for Benjamin—I’ve heard many cases.”

Guerrero-Cruz’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

He’s not the only one who’s been transferred with no notice to family, sometimes across the country. While moving people across state lines isn’t new, it’s something that is happening more frequently as the Trump administration pushes ahead with its deportation agenda, a move critics point out not only distances them from their families, but also from legal support.

“I’ve had clients moved internally within California with zero notification to me as the attorney of record, but certainly for people who are not represented, there’s now a lot of evidence that people are being across state lines with no notice,” said Nico Thompson-Lleras, a removal defense attorney at CHIRLA, a nonprofit focused on immigrant rights. “I’ve spoken with people in California who were detained in Maine, who were detained in upstate New York, who have absolutely no connection to Southern California.”

Thompson-Lleras said that the nationwide movement of detainees “disrupts the attorney-client relationship to the point where sometimes it has to end altogether.”

ICE did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.

The government has stated that the movement of detained migrants depends on available space. Most detention centers are in southern states including Louisiana, where Guerrero-Cruz was scheduled to be sent, a state that along with Texas, holds more than half of all people in detention in the United States, according to TRAC data.

When someone is detained, family members and lawyers can use the Online Detainee Locator System to see where people are held. But it does not provide information about people when they are being transported between detention centers, and advocates say the system often has a lag time.

“The government, or in this case the holding facility, is not going to make the effort to identify family members that the person has been moved. They’re not set up to function as being able to be helpful to people,” said Adriana Cadena, the executive director at Protecting Immigrant Families coalition. “On the contrary, they’re set up to create a mystery about how you can actually locate someone. They’re not helpful to family members of those who are trying to locate a loved one.”

Cadena said the rapid movement of people in detention centers is part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to “create fear among immigrant communities.”

“It’s part of a whole campaign unfortunately that is happening around the country where you’re targeting a group of people, you’re making it difficult for these people to live in their communities and when they detain someone, they’re shipping them away to a place that they don’t know, into a city that is far away from their support system,” Cadenas said.

Rivas introduced the INFORM Act on Aug. 29 following Guerrero-Cruz’s rapid transfers. The legislation has stalled in the House.

For now, Rivas said she will continue oversight of facilities including Adelanto and visit her detained constituents, including Guerrero-Cruz, as much as possible.

“I saw him today, they didn’t allow me to visit him but I saw him at the hearing looking at us,” Rivas told NOTUS on Wednesday. “He should not be there. If you saw what I saw, it’s a kid. He looks like a teenage boy that belongs in a math class right now and not in a court hearing.”