The Marshall Project sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection on October 20, seeking the names, ages and current locations of everyone listed in ICE’s detention database. The case follows months of records requests and appeals over information about people held in immigration detention.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court, argues that ICE is legally obligated to disclose the information, according to The Marshall Project. The newsroom says it believes this is the first effort since President Trump returned to office to force disclosure of the entire database. Attorneys from Chicago law firm Loevy & Loevy represent the newsroom.
The records dispute began in April, when the outlet asked ICE and CBP for detainees’ names, dates of birth and current detention locations, the same report notes. Both agencies denied the requests and subsequent administrative appeals. The lawsuit came after those steps failed to obtain the records.
ICE Cites Privacy and Maintains a Separate Locator
In its formal response in August, ICE argued that releasing detainees’ names, full birth dates and current locations in bulk would implicate substantial privacy interests. ICE also maintains a searchable online detainee locator, which immigration attorneys and advocates say can be unreliable, slow to update and incomplete. The Enforcement Integrated Database is a separate system that draws on records from other federal agencies involved in immigration enforcement, including CBP.
The lawsuit puts ICE’s privacy rationale against the public interest in knowing who is held in federal immigration custody and where. The American Civil Liberties Union has separately argued that secret arrests by federal law enforcement agencies endanger democracy.
ICE referred questions about the case to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond to a request for comment, and CBP likewise did not respond, the newsroom reports.
Cases Where People Simply Vanished From the System
The Marshall Project has reported cases in which people were difficult to locate while in immigration custody. In one case, the outlet reported, ICE held a man at detention camps around the country for five days before deporting him to Somalia in December 2025.
The outlet also reported that ICE stopped publicly revealing the whereabouts of thousands of immigrants with final deportation orders in fall 2026. These cases illustrate the information gap at the center of the lawsuit, which seeks records covering everyone in ICE’s detention database.
A Similar Chicago Case Is Already on Appeal
The Marshall Project's nationwide suit follows a narrower, earlier fight in Chicago. Block Club Chicago filed a FOIA lawsuit in January 2025 seeking unredacted spreadsheet records documenting who ICE arrested and detained during a 10-day immigration enforcement operation in the Chicago area, according to court records reviewed on CourtListener. ICE denied that request too.
A federal district judge ruled in April 2026 that detainees' privacy interests outweighed the need for public disclosure, and the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy confirmed the court granted the government's motion for summary judgment while denying Block Club Chicago's cross-motion. That case is now on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; if Block Club Chicago eventually prevails, it could force ICE to disclose details about the people detained in Chicago back in January 2025. Federal courts have, in general, allowed federal law-enforcement agencies to withhold detainee names to protect privacy, under a FOIA provision that permits withholding records when disclosure could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
Detentions Have Surged Nationwide
The legal fight is unfolding against a backdrop of rapidly expanding detention. ICE has grown to more than 20,000 agents since January 2025, and immigrant detentions increased between March and July in nearly every state, per The Marshall Project. In 2025, ICE deployed large enforcement operations to Los Angeles, Chicago and Minnesota, resulting in thousands of arrests, a growing number of shootings and significant public backlash. ICE ended its enforcement surge in Minnesota in February 2026, shifting its approach from large urban deployments toward more diffuse community detentions carried out in cooperation with local law enforcement.
Independent data efforts have struggled to fill the information gap the lawsuit is targeting. The Deportation Data Project periodically obtains detention numbers from ICE, but that data contains no detainee names and only limited details about the people ICE has arrested, according to the Deportation Data Project. Separately, research from Vera Institute of Justice found that in July 2026, ICE detained people in 469 facilities, excluding medical facilities, while acknowledging the use of just 208 of them on its own website.
What Existing Records and Precedents Show
ICE says its Enforcement and Removal Operations dashboards present information and trends on arrests, detentions, removals and alternatives to detention as of December 31, 2024, with quarterly updates planned, according to ICE. The dashboards provide nationwide statistics, while the lawsuit seeks individual names, ages and locations. Earlier court and oversight findings address related but distinct issues. In 2002, the Third Circuit ruled that newspapers had no First Amendment right of access to certain deportation proceedings designated as presenting national-security concerns; that case concerned access to hearings, not a FOIA request for a detainee database, according to the ACLU of New Jersey. Separately, a 2018 DHS Office of Inspector General review said disconnected CBP, ICE and HHS information systems hindered efforts to identify, track and reunify families separated under the Zero Tolerance Policy. That finding concerned family-separation tracking, not the current FOIA dispute or ICE’s public locator.
