After immigrants are detained by ICE, there are probably records somewhere of who has an attorney, and who is calling family members or an attorney.
For the immigrants who aren’t calling any family or lawyers, the poorest of the poor, people with little to no connection to anyone, who may not even say which country they are from, if the administration were actually trying to kill as many disconnected immigrants as possible in secret, would society know?
For example, if the administration was composed of all types of conservative people, but 30 percent were secretly Nazis or wanted racial genocide, could there be a campaign to not just remove, but kill, immigrants, and the public doesn’t find out?
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/25/men-lost-from-alligator-alcatraz/
Theoretically? No.
In reality it’s already happening.
This is from ONE concentration camp. If they’re moving people between these ‘detention centers’ and fudging the data or straight up not recording anything on where people are, then they can disappear who they want, and by the time their lawyers or family get visit approval it’s already too late.
We still have a (mostly) free press though. Eventually families and counsel would find out and the news would get it. Unless it started very recently I don’t find this credible.
Your source is paywalled fyi.
Do we have a free press?
I was a Palestine protestor at my college encampment. When I tell you that I lost so much faith in journalism after the lies they printed about us, I want you to take my full meaning. For persec reasons, I won’t say where or what they printed. But I remember camp being equal parts hopeful and defiant, and angry and resolute. I was one of the few with any real camping experience, so my self-assigned task was repairing tents and reviewing sleeping accommodations to make sure no one was cold or sleeping poorly. What the press made it look like was ‘group of absolutely clinically loony college kids invite hoards of homeless bums to their college and start trashing everything in sight under guise of protest’.
Without fail, it was recognizable and ‘reputable’ news orgs that were printing bald-faced outright lies about us. A few of the journalists I interacted with expressed… regret. Despair. Only one I met seemed happy to be there. The rest, the look on their faces made it feel like they were at our funeral. The ones that printed the truth? A local headshop magazine that usually covered what strains of cannabis were popular, and Unicorn Riot. The offbeat weirdos or dedicated ideologues.
It was so jarring to see a profession I regarded so highly eviscerating the truth. I’ve lost all faith in corporate media, and I will never get it back.
OK so it depends on what you mean by free press. I meant you can report the truth and that (usually) won’t get you arrested. I did not mean the mainstream press is always fair or honest.
There’s been a huge growth of independent journalists that give far more accurate accounts of leftist perspectives in protests, etc. Though you have to be careful because there’s plenty of dishonest independent journalists too. But if you have good media literacy and fact checking ability the information is still out there. As opposed to places where if you speak certain facts aloud you may be arrested.
https://www.latintimes.com/lawyers-report-disappearance-hundreds-alligator-alcatraz-detainees-ice-database-its-black-589703
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-09-18/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-hundreds-of-immigrants-detained-at-alligator-alcatraz.html
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article312042943.html
And from my own searches
https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/1200-missing-detainees-alligator-alcatraz-42be3b
https://www.watchdognews.org/800-missing-alligator-alcatraz-horror-unfolds/
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/25/alligator_alcatraz
Do we?
As far as I can tell, people can still report on these facts without major safety risk. Yes, the free press is under attack but it hasn’t succumbed yet.
Odd, nothing asked me to pay to read, give me a sec and I’ll pull their sources for you to assuage some of that doubt.