U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a Dec. 15 compliance report that it reduced its Freedom of Information Act request backlog for certain immigration records by 99.96% over the course of three months, an impressive feat given recent workforce cuts to agency FOIA teams and a 43-day government shutdown occurred during the period.
But a whistleblower disclosure sent to the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees on Friday argues that the agency has adopted unnecessarily strict criteria to summarily reject FOIA requests from migrants seeking documents for their immigration proceedings.
“The circumstances alongside the whistleblower’s disclosures suggest the reported reduction does not reflect timely, good-faith FOIA processing but rather mass closures of requests and other procedural mechanisms that remove requests from the pending inventory without reasonable searches or release of responsive records,” according to the document.
In 2020, a federal judge in Nightingale v. USCIS ordered the agency to meet statutory FOIA deadlines (generally 20-30 business days) for A-File immigration record requests, eliminate existing backlogs for such requests within 60 days and submit quarterly compliance reports.
USCIS’ National Records Center maintains more than 55.6 million immigration records and has the largest federal FOIA program.
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