If Ryan Blaney’s analysis of the NASCAR Chase is accurate, then his championship bid is already over after only three of 10 races in the run to the title.
“I just don’t see that you can finish outside the top 30 multiple times and have a shot,” Blaney said last week. “It’s just going to be too much to make up.”
Three days later, Blaney finished 33rd at Bristol Motor Speedway, the second consecutive finish outside the top 30 for the 2023 Cup Series champion. Blaney has plummeted from second to sixth in the standings since the Chase began, and his frustrations boiled over in a fight with Carson Hocevar, who bumped Blaney into a crash that ended a promising Bristol race after the Team Penske star led a race-high 202 laps.
“I understand why he’s upset,” Hocevar said. “That’s probably his championship. I’d probably be mad, too.”
During the playoff system that existed the past 12 seasons, Bristol was a cutoff race in which four drivers were eliminated from title contention, and the points were reset for the rest of the field.
In the Chase reintroduced by NASCAR this season, all 16 drivers remain mathematically eligible for the title but without a points reset — which leaves Blaney already on the fringe of contention.
He trails leader Kyle Larson by 51 points, which is more than double his deficit to open the Chase.
Meanwhile, Larson and Bristol winner Joey Logano are headed in the other direction by averaging more than 50 points per race since the Chase started.
Larson has erased a 55-point deficit to take a one-point lead on top-seeded Denny Hamlin heading into a stretch of three 1.5-mile ovals where Larson has excelled. He has three wins apiece at Kansas Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the next two tracks on the Cup circuit.
“It’s good, but there’s still so much racing left,” Larson said after a second at Bristol marked his third top five in a row (including a Gateway victory that snapped a 51-race win drought ). “Just got to keep having good consistent days. We’re going to some good tracks for us, but it could easily change a lot in the upcoming weeks. We’ve just got to keep plugging away.”
Logano, who started the Chase ranked ninth with a 65-point deficit, has surged to third and trails by 16 points.
“It was a big hole that we dug ourselves, and trying to make that up on the best teams, it’s really hard to do that,” Logano said. “We’ve done a tremendous job, but it goes to show how quickly it can go the other way. You’ve got to get hot at the right time and take advantage of the cars when you have them.”
Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe set a weekly goal of averaging 40 points during the Chase to have a shot at winning the championship.
In the first iteration of the Chase from 2004-13, the 10 Cup champions averaged a seventh-place finish over the final 10 races. But with the 2017 introduction of stages, two predetermined sections during every race in which the top 10 are awarded points, there is a greater emphasis on running well from green to checkered flag.
Wolfe said the stage points make it possible to make up ground more quickly as Larson (38 stage points) and Logano (37) have shown in the past three races.
“When a team gets hot, and they’re able to win stages, run up front and win a race or two, you can close that gap pretty quick,” Wolfe said. “Maybe quicker than all of us anticipated when these playoffs started.”
Another way to close the gap is by winning. The value of a first-place finish was increased by 15 points this year, and the three Chase victories belong to three of the top four drivers in the standings (Larson, Logano and Darlington winner Christopher Bell).
“I think you’re going to have to win multiple races in the Chase to just keep up,” Blaney said.
NASCAR announced Monday afternoon that there would be no penalties for Blaney and Hocevar, but a further review will determine any punishment for crew members involved in the incident. Competition executives will meet Tuesday for a weekly postrace debrief that includes penalty discussions.
“We’re not going to encourage fighting, but what we are going to encourage is passion,” NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell said in an appearance on Kevin Harvick’s podcast Monday. “Blaney’s showing his passion, showing his fire.”
Hocevar said NASCAR would “lose ticket sales” if he was penalized for punching Blaney.
“I would have to think not,” he said. “I kind of have to defend myself at some point.”
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Ty Gibbs (54) leads Carson Hocevar (77), Kyle Larson (5), and Ryan Blaney (12) during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026, in Bristol, Tenn. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)
Joey Logano (22) leads Carson Hocevar, back, during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026, in Bristol, Tenn. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)
Joey Logano (22) celebrates after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026, in Bristol, Tenn. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.
ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.
The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.
The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.
The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.
The effort to hide their locations adds to the ways in which the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.
ICE did not publicize the move and in a statement issued to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it. The statement said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.
As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation, which is especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” he said. “On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship.”
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE's parent agency, has argued that people who are subject to final removal orders have received due process. That usually means an immigration judge has ordered their removal after a hearing, including cases when immigrants fail to show up, and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.
Still, those detainees have options to challenge their detention and removal, including seeking to reopen the case or by bringing what’s known as a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering that detainees be released or granted bond hearings.
ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. Around 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.
More people have been issued final removal orders after failing to show up for hearings in recent months because the administration's immigration courts have taken steps to make it harder to participate and to reopen such cases, she said.
“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”
Some with final removal orders also have legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many of them are facing removal to third-party countries where they have no ties and their disappearance in ICE's system will make legal challenges harder, lawyers said.
ICE initiated the online detainee locator system in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers and the public to search for people in custody. Previously they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to try to track them down.
Many advocates and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield the locations of detainees for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transported are not in the system, among others.
But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday.
Among those disappeared from the locator system are eight Somali men being detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo, of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.
“If you can't find your client, don't know what's happening to your client, you can't get that information to the court to stop their removal,” she said.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website used to locate someone in immigration detention is displayed, Monday, Sept. 21, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Rachel Leathe)
FILE - An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer's badge is visible during an ICE hiring fair, Aug. 26, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)
