“If an officer is saying, ‘Yeah, you don’t have any chance of staying in the U.S., this is the best option you have,’ [detainees] don’t have a lawyer who can actually look at the facts of their immigration case and tell them, ‘OK, here are your options,’” said Tess Hellgren, a supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project. “It deprives them of agency over their case so much, and they’re not getting the correct information about what their different choices are.” In an Oregon case last fall involving farmworkers detained in and near Woodburn, attorney Kelsey Provo wrote in a federal court declaration that she and her colleagues raced to advise detainees because, from prior experience, they knew that “ICE transfers people out of the facility quickly.” Provo added that “both prior to and after transfer, ICE pressures people to sign documents waiving important rights.” One of those detainees was a woman identified in court records as M-J-M-A, a 45-year-old Mexican citizen arrested on Oct. 30 on her way to work. She and more than two dozen others were taken to the Portland ICE facility, where Provo and her colleagues waited about an hour before meeting with the first detainee. M-J-M-A had entered the country legally in January 2025 and overstayed her visa, the government said in a court filing. In her own declaration, she wrote that she feared returning to Mexico and intended to apply for asylum. By the time Provo and her colleague met with her at noon, M-J-M-A had already been forced by an ICE officer to sign a document she didn’t understand, according to her declaration. The officer also told her that if she didn’t agree to be removed voluntarily, “it would take a very long time for [her] to leave.” The document she signed was in Spanish. It is a routine form that detainees and those undergoing immigration proceedings are asked to fill out. It lays out a detainee’s rights and asks them to choose how they want their case to proceed. M-J-M-A selected the option on the form that waived her right to an immigration court hearing and requested that she return to her home country as soon as possible. Provo said a person has a right to consult a lawyer when answering the questions on the form “because they are making important decisions about the future of their rights and what rights they want to exercise and what rights they want to give up.” Weeks later, at an evidentiary hearing, the ICE officer who had presented the document to M-J-M-A “was unable to translate lines from the form that he claimed to have discussed with and explained” to her, the judge wrote in a later order. The officer’s testimony raised “significant doubts about the quality and depth of communications” with M-J-M-A “as she considered her due process rights and made vital decisions,” the judge wrote. When Provo and her colleague finally met with M-J-M-A, they had about 10 minutes before an officer ended the meeting, Provo said in her declaration. Shortly after, ICE officers shackled M-J-M-A and loaded her onto a bus headed to Tacoma, Washington. Nearly a full day would pass before she appeared in the detainee locator, and the earliest her lawyers could meet with her was about two days later. At that point, Provo was growing increasingly concerned that M-J-M-A, without access to legal advice, might sign documents affecting her case. But because M-J-M-A’s lawyers had filed a habeas petition just eight minutes before she was moved out of state, the case remained before a federal court in Oregon. Hellgren, who worked with the legal team at the time, said that meant M-J-M-A could be released and that it was still possible for a court to step in and scrutinize what had happened to her. Without that intervention, what happened in her case may have stayed hidden, Hellgren said. _________________________________________________________ Mohamed was moved so rapidly during the final days of his detention that the narrow options his lawyer and family were pursuing never had a chance to materialize. They were no longer trying to reopen the case involving his old removal order, but were instead trying to get him released from detention long enough for him to get his affairs in order before leaving the country. In emails to the family in mid-December, his lawyer wrote that ICE had not responded to those requests despite weeks of calls and emails. He also didn’t know whether the government had secured the travel documents needed to deport Mohamed, even as the family tried to determine if there was still time to file a habeas petition. Then, suddenly, ICE started moving Mohamed around the country. He eventually called his family from Mogadishu and relayed his deportation journey. In about five days, he told them, ICE had sent him from Massachusetts to Mississippi to Louisiana and then to Texas. From there, he boarded a deportation flight that crossed several countries in West, Central and East Africa, until he finally landed in Somalia. He said he had been beaten and shackled, and had endured long stretches without food or water. “There is no family for me here,” Mohamed told The Marshall Project from Mogadishu. “Nothing. No future.” Since his deportation, his wife has been in hiding due to her own immigration status. She spent hours on the phone with Mohamed, trying to figure out how to help him and what was left of the future they planned together, Saynab Mohamed said. “When your partner for life is gone, you feel kind of lost,” she said. Abdullahi Mohamed said he has no way to support himself in Somalia, a country he hasn’t lived in for decades. His parents are dead, and Saynab Mohamed, his only living sibling, is the main reason he had built a life in the U.S. To help offset medical and legal costs, his family has set up a GoFundMe. In the first year of Trump’s second term, ICE detained and deported 13,500 people in much the same way as Mohamed. Within a week, they were first transferred from the facility where they had been detained for a lengthy period and then sent to a series of other facilities before being deported. This represents more than twice the number of people the U.S. government had similarly deported during the previous year, an increase that far outpaced the growth in the overall number of people the government detained. According to the agency’s 2025 national detention standards, when deciding on a transfer, ICE takes into account whether a detainee is represented before the immigration court. ICE will consider alternatives to transfer, especially if the lawyer is nearby and court proceedings are underway. The standards also say detainees are not told about a transfer until just before they leave the facility, when ICE notifies them they are being moved to another facility in the U.S. and not being deported. They are then given the new facility’s contact information in writing, and the standards say ICE will contact the attorney of record. But much of the process that ICE uses to decide when and where to move someone remains opaque, attorneys say. “The rules are absolutely not clear,” said Hellgren, who was part of the legal team that sued ICE last year for records explaining how the agency decides where to detain and when to transfer those in its custody. “We don’t even know what all their own policies are because of the lack of transparency here,” she said. During the litigation last year, ICE ultimately produced a limited set of documents, including a three-page “detainee transfer checklist” used when the agency moves someone outside the “area of responsibility,” meaning the geographic region overseen by a local field office. The checklist directs officers to document whether the detainee has an attorney of record in that region, immediate family ties or a pending court case. If any of those factors applies, a senior official must approve the transfer. The form also says attorneys are to be notified of a transfer “as soon as practicable” and no later than 24 hours after it happens. In her experience, Hellgren sees no evidence that those factors are being considered. “The speed of transfers is so extreme,” she said, “it’s hard to understand how they could be considering these factors.” In late March, a federal judge in Minnesota extended an order that barred ICE from transferring people out of state during the first 72 hours of detention, a restriction meant to stop rapid transfers from cutting detainees off from their lawyers. The order also required ICE to ensure that the locator stays updated, and required that it provide free, private phone access to detainees while informing them where they would be transferred. Attorneys say broader reforms could follow the same logic by requiring ICE to give people notice of available legal help as soon as they’re detained, and to provide the time and private space for meeting with lawyers, interpretation when needed, and access to relevant arrest and detention paperwork before they are transferred. After Mohamed’s sudden removal, his family flew to Maine to retrieve his car and drive it back to North Carolina, where they live. They had to sort out the title and the rest of his belongings, Nour said. On the drive, they called Mohamed so he could guide them through the roads from memory. “He’s American, he’s telling us the roads,” Nour said. “He knows it better than we do.” Methodology The Marshall Project analyzed detention stint data from ICE obtained and processed by the Deportation Data Project. Each row of data represents a detention stint, a person’s period of confinement in a single facility. Many people have multiple detention stints as they are transferred from facility to facility throughout their stay in detention. The data includes a unique identifier for each person. Some people were detained for multiple stays in the period covered by the data. We began our analysis by grouping the stints into stays, counting the stints and then calculating the time between the book-in and book-out dates of the person’s stay, as well as the book-in and book-out of each stint. The Deportation Data Project’s data contains records for people in detention between Oct. 1, 2022, and March 11, 2026. We analyzed detention stays with book-in dates during the first year of the second Trump administration (Jan. 20, 2025, through Jan. 19, 2026) and the last year of the Biden administration (Jan. 20, 2024, through Jan. 19, 2025). To identify detainees rapidly transferred to a different state, we ordered stints within stays by book-in date and identified the first stint that was in a different state than the initial stint. We then calculated the duration between the stay book-in date and the book-out date before they were first transferred to another state. If that duration was less than a day, the stay was included in the count of rapid transfers. We counted the unique identifiers within that set of stays to determine the number of people who experienced the rapid out-of-state transfers. To identify people who were rapidly transferred leading up to deportation, The Marshall Project identified stays where the release reason listed deportation. We then identified the longest stint of at least 30 days and calculated the duration between the book-out date and time of that stint and the book-out date and time of the entire stay. If that duration was less than seven days and the person was detained in at least two facilities after their longest stint, they were included in the count. We also analyzed the entire time period covered by the data, comparing all available book-ins before the beginning of the second Trump administration to all book-ins after, and found similar trends.