Agency Demands $111,930 for Database Description

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) filed a protest with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), objecting to a demand that the university-based data research organization pay $111,930 for a description of the information in one of its databases. TRAC seeks a description of the agency's processing of requests for naturalization that it receives. The FOIA request had been pending without a response for nearly 4 years - 1,316 days.

Read more about it here and here.

Criminal Deportees Often Fly Solo on Commercial Airlines

Immigration and Customs Enforcement records and officials show illegal immigrants routinely fly on commercial airlines without an escort when being deported.  

The Houston Chronicle reports:

“This is an absolute risk to public safety,” said Chris Crane, ICE Council 118's vice president for Detention and Removal Operations.“And it's happening every day.”

Of the 27,899 illegal immigrants put on commercial airlines last year for deportation at a cost of nearly $44 million, more than 75 percent flew unescorted, according to ICE data.

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FOIA Request Shows Gaps in ICE Detention Records

Based on records obtained by the Associated Press through FOIA requests, the Washington Post reports that think tank Migration Policy Institute has identified several gaps in the record-keeping of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These gaps include:

* whether an immigrant must be detained;
* whether a detainee is dangerous;
* whether a detainee might have a claim to U.S. citizenship; and
* whether a immigrant has a special medical condition or mental health issues.

The think tank also says ICE's database should include answers to procedural questions that would ensure the federal government is not holding the immigrants indefinitely.

Law center questions Homeland Security's classifications of 'extremists'

The Thomas More Law Center is asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain why it classifies "Americans who oppose abortion, support 2nd Amendment gun rights and dislike lax immigration law enforcement" extremists, WorldNetDaily reported. The question stems from a right wing extremism report that alerted police to these American "extremists."

The Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Mich., says it has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security demanding why it calls Americans who oppose abortion, support 2nd Amendment gun rights and dislike lax immigration law enforcement "extremists."

"This is not an intelligence report but a diatribe against those who oppose the policies of the Obama administration," said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel for the organization.

"It is a declaration of war against the American people and our constitution. It is a prelude to extreme gun control legislation and hate speech laws targeting Christian churches and others who oppose abortion and same sex marriage," he continued. "The federal government should be focusing its attention on the 35 radical Muslim compounds in the U.S. training its followers on how to kidnap and kill Americans."

More here.

In Rhode Island, Secrecy Plagues Immigration Detentions

Since the middle of last month, at least 84 suspected illegal immigrants have been arrested throughout Rhode Island, including two highly publicized mass arrests — one at state courthouses last week.

The arrests raise many questions.

Has the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted Rhode Island for a crackdown on illegal immigration? Exactly how many people have been arrested so far this year? Where are they being detained? And, are these stepped-up raids driven by Governor Carcieri’s executive order on illegal immigration?

Unlike other law enforcement agencies that are compelled to release such information, ICE often operates in secret, say lawyers, advocates for freedom of the press and civil libertarians.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Rhode Island raids represent “the same story” as ACLU has experienced in past dealings with ICE.

“Many detainees end up in an impenetrable rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland,” said Brown. “They are often impossible to find, ICE is often unable to tell family members where they are held — and then, when you finally find them, a chess game begins, where these detainees get transferred to distant places across the country.”

More here.

FOI At Work: The Times on Immigration Detention Deaths

A great example of FOIA at work:

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

More here.