ICE is removing thousands of detainees from its online locator, according to the Associated Press, making it more difficult for lawyers and families to find them.

The AP reports the agency is no longer publicly sharing the location of detainees who have final deportation orders, in an unannounced policy change.

“As you can imagine, this caused a great deal of anxiety to family members who no longer knew where their loved one was, to attorneys, who didn’t know where their clients were,” immigration attorney Andrew Nietor said, calling the move “very disturbing.”

“It’s not even clear how long these individuals had been out of that locator system,” he continued. “It just turned out that attorneys were talking to each other and started noticing.”

“Keep in mind, when ICE detains somebody, whether it’s in their home, or at work, or on the street, it’s not always clear where ICE takes that individual,” Nietor said.

“ICE does not ‘disappear’ people,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement when asked about the change. “This is a ridiculous lie that the media is peddling to demonize ICE law enforcement.”

“Illegal aliens in detention have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” DHS continued. “The appropriate process due to an illegal alien with final deportation orders is removal, plain and simple. That said, DHS has a stringent law enforcement assessment in place that abides by due process under the U.S. Constitution.”

“It’s been happening,” said one man who was detained last year and asked to go by David. “When I was in there, some of the guys were asking where they were – a lot of them were actually asking where they were, because they were moving them from detention centers, from one state to another.”

David said he was brought to the U.S. when he was two years old and was waiting to turn 15 so he could apply for DACA when the program closed to new applicants – days before he was eligible.

He was headed to work in North County late last year when federal agents pulled him over.

“All I did was go to work and all of a sudden, I’m considered a criminal just for existing, for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time,” David said.

“I was lucky that my little brother was with me, and he’s a citizen,” he continued. “He was there with me when they broke my car window and took me out, and then took me. But they also wanted to take him too.”

David said he later found out the agents let his brother go, but he was taken to the federal building in downtown San Diego, where he spent a day, then was put into a van with covered windows in the middle of the night.

“You can’t see anything. You’re exhausted and you’re hungry. You’re cold and you’re scared, you don’t know where you’re going and you don’t know where you’re ending up,” David said. “I was expecting for them to just leave me on the side of the road in Tijuana, because that’s what they told me they were going to do, or I was expecting for them to put me on a plane then and there.”

Nietor said a final order of removal is “a term of art” that ICE defines “quite broadly.”

“That could even include individuals who still have opportunities to file motions or file appeals,” he said. “So having a final order of removal is not the end of the fight for most people who are detained. It’s just a piece of paper, and then that piece of paper can still be challenged. In fact, so many of the challenges that have been successful in the courts, including in federal courts, have been challenges to final orders of deportation and final orders of removal where the courts have said: this was not done appropriately.”

Nietor said if he needs to file something in a case, where he files it depends on where his client is being held, and he also needs to know where they so he can communicate with them – but that’s not always the case, particularly when clients are transferred to another facility without notice.

“Sometimes we try to visit a client and for some reason, they’re not there,” Nietor said. “Or we get a call from a client who we thought was, you know, a 20-minute drive away at Otay Mesa, and now they’re 3,000 miles away.”

David ended up at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, but said he didn’t know it at first.

“When we were asking, ‘Where are we?’ They wouldn’t tell us where we were,” David recalled of the facility’s staff.

He said the other detainees were the ones who told him where they were – then one pointed something out he said he’ll never forget.

“He looked at the floor and told me, ‘Everyone’s wearing work boots, everyone’s wearing work pants, everyone’s shirts are stained with paint or cement or something,’” David recalled. “He was like, ‘Where are the criminals?’”

David said he was in boots too. Now, he’s out on bond and wearing an ankle monitor – not allowed to work and due back in immigration court next month as he waits for a judge to decide his fate.

“People say we’re criminals, monsters, we’re taking jobs and all this and that. All the work I’ve ever done, it’s always been hard labor. It’s been work that nobody wants to do. It’s work that hurts. Your back hurts, your joints hurt. Everything hurts,” David said. “I just wanted to keep staying with my family.”