No option to delete, can't drag to recycle bin

I'm tasked with redacting a bunch of confidential documents. I created a directory structure identical the original data set, so that I can simply maintain a "NOT REDACTED" set and a "REDACTED" set that are organized in the same way.

This involves moving files from the NOT REDACTED structure to the REDACTED structure. However, sometimes I am not allowed to delete the files or to move them to their desired destination. It doesn't seem to have to do with administrator permissions -- I'm an admin -- rather, the ordinary options to do the things I want to do are simply not there.

e.g.:

*can't move the files to desired destination -- option to MOVE is not present in context menu, nor is the option to CUT

*can copy the files to desired destination, but NOT delete the originals from the location they need to be removed from -- DELETE option is not present in context menu, and when I try to drag to Recycle Bin, I get a little "NO YOU CAN'T DO THAT" symbol.

Nearest I can tell is that this has something to do with the directories being close to the root level of the drive -- this is necessary because the filenames are extremely long and otherwise I'll get failed copy/move operations that leave me without a clear picture of which files are where.

PLEASE HELP

 

Couldn't edit; as another wrinkle, the most recent instance of this problem (and perhaps all instances; I wasn't paying attention) occurred while trying to delete or move items directly from a Windows search results window. This is odd because it seemed like sometimes I could simply select a large number of search results and move/delete/etc as needed. But in this case I could not do anything. In fact the only way I could delete the files was to right click a search result, select Show File Location, delete the highlighted file, click BACK to return to the search results, rinse repeat. Very odd.