Contact: Marguerite Telford
202-466-8185, [email protected]
Washington, D.C. (March 5, 2019) - The Center for Immigration Studies announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Center for Immigration Studies v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (No. 19-cv-605). The Center was compelled to file after ICE failed to comply with the time limit set forth in federal statute with respect to the CIS December FOIA request for specific information pertaining to individuals removed from the United States from 2014-2018.
The lawsuit seeks information such as immigration status and charges, location of arrest, country of citizenship, criminal convictions, place of entry, and departure date. This information will update the Center’s database of removals since ICE’s creation in 2003, and will permit ongoing detailed analysis of immigration enforcement activities over time.
Jessica Vaughan, the Center’s director of policy studies, said, “The Center has brought this action against ICE in an effort to ensure that we have timely access to government data that will enable us to produce fact-based reports on immigration enforcement that are useful to policymakers and the public. This endeavor is especially critical now, when too much misinformation and too many biased studies are contributing to a false narrative about immigration enforcement.”