The Agencies Key To Trump’s Immigration Agenda Keep A Lot Of Secrets
Getting responses through the Freedom Of Information Act can be a serious challenge.
By Dana Liebelson, HuffPost, Apr. 3, 2018
WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump has made his promise of aggressive immigration enforcement the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. But two agencies tasked with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws — U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — have long attracted criticism for failing to release documents and data in a timely manner, if at all. That makes it hard for journalists, advocates, lawyers and the public to keep tabs on what the administration is doing.
Under the law, the government is supposed to grant or deny Freedom of Information Act requests (which any member of the public can file) within 20 working days, with some exceptions, and provide records unless the information is legally exempt from disclosure.
But if you file a FOIA request with ICE or CBP, you may find yourself in a bureaucratic morass: Fighting a faceless online portal (with CBP), watching your request ping-pong between agencies or sub-agencies, getting summarily rejected, struggling to talk to a human (ICE switched to an email-only system about two years ago), and waiting months — or more than a year — to get back a document that may be heavily redacted, according to HuffPost interviews with requesters. Some say they must resort to litigation to get any meaningful response.
Read more here.