Federal immigration officials, in a significant strategy shift that is sending shudders through immigrant communities, are for the first time aggressively tracking down foreign nationals who have been ordered deported but who have managed to evade capture.

Under a plan dubbed Endgame, teams of federal agents are being deployed to find more than 400,000 illegal immigrants so they can be expelled from the United States.

Since the program began eight months ago, more than 7,000 people have been detained across the country. Federal officials have set an ambitious goal: to deport all “absconders,” as immigration agents refer to them, within 10 years.

But the stepped-up enforcement has raised alarms among immigration lawyers and activists.

They say that faulty information in old immigration files, backlogs in processing applications, misplaced records, wrong addresses and misspelled names have led agents to arrest people who were not even aware that final deportation orders had been issued against them and others who had become legal residents.

Indeed, a recent Justice Department internal investigation skewered the immigration service for shoddy record-keeping.

“We found name discrepancies … nationality discrepancies, and case file number discrepancies,” investigators from the inspector general’s office at the Justice Department wrote in their report.

Endgame has angered immigrant advocates, who say the dragnet is ensnaring innocent people or hard-working people who are simply trying to support themselves and their families.

“Immigration had previously stated that their priority … was criminal aliens and those that posed a threat to the national security,” said Miami immigration attorney Jorge Rivera. “It is unfortunate that Immigration is targeting families … that do not have any prior arrests and therefore do not pose any threat or danger to the community. Many of these families have significant ties to the United States and would suffer extreme hardship if they were deported.”