UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE, Plaintiff, Case No. 1:21-cv-01364 (TNM) v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, et al., Defendants. MEMORANDUM OPINION Court dockets in this district overflow with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) matters. Many of those cases seek reams of records, requiring massive efforts from defendant agencies. Despite the at times Sisyphean effort to respond, agencies rarely object to the breadth of a request. But sometimes they do. This is one of those cases. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) submitted a FOIA request to four agencies for responsive records about eight broadly defined immigration- related subject areas. When the agencies failed to timely respond, ACLJ sued. The agencies move to dismiss, arguing that ACLJ’s underlying FOIA request was overbroad. The Court agrees and will dismiss the case. I. The southern border occupies a prominent spot in our nation’s public discourse. Border policies tend to fluctuate with each incoming administration. The Biden Administration is no different. After President Biden took office, he changed (sometimes wholesale) his predecessor’s immigration policies. For example, the new administration stopped Operation Talon, a program “aimed at removing convicted sex offenders” living illegally in the United States. Compl. Ex. 1 at 6, ECF No. 1-1. 1 In early 2021, media outlets reported a surge of illegal migrants at the southern border. See generally id. at 2–9. This surge threatened to overload the country’s immigration agencies. Some policymakers worried that terrorists might slip through in the mass migration. See Compl. Ex. 1 at 6 (statement of Rep. Katko). Indeed, media outlets reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had caught two men listed on the FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist. See id. at 8–9. Other policymakers worried that some migrants might contract COVID-19 in the overcrowded detention facilities and would carry the virus into the United States. See id. at 8. The media also reported that the Biden Administration refused to call the situation a “crisis,” instead directing officials to use the word “challenge” when discussing the chaos. See id. at 2–3. Enter ACLJ, which submitted a FOIA request to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several of its daughter agencies: CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). The request sought “any and all records” about eight subjects: 2 • Instructions from the Biden Administration to refer publicly to the migrant surge as a “challenge,” not a crisis, see Compl. Ex. 1 at 10; • Records of how many migrants remain in custody, how many of those have been released without a court date, and how many are convicted criminals. See id. at 11. More, any actions taken (1) to prevent trafficking of unaccompanied minors 1 All page citations refer to the page numbers that the CM/ECF system generates, and all exhibit numbers refer to the numbered attachments to the CM/ECF filings. 2 ACLJ’s request technically includes nine categories of information. But the seventh and eighth categories both discuss …
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Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals