Tag: FOIA
To shed light on the cruel and unlawful practice of family separation, a group of immigrant rights organizations filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to multiple government agencies this week. The groups seek agency records underlying an unconscionable practice where immigration officials at the border purposefully divide families–taking children from their parents […]
Each year on November 1 and 2, people around the world celebrate the Day of the Dead—sometimes called All Souls Day or Día de los Muertos in Spanish—to remember and honor children and adults who have died. To date, since 2003, 165 people have died in immigration detention, including ten in Fiscal Year 2016 (ending […]
More than two years after the Obama Administration launched its aggressive expansion of family detention in an attempt to “deter” the arrival of asylum-seeking Central American families, numerous problems associated with such practice have been brought to light. One such issue is the separation of family units while in U.S. custody. A report released this […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is continuing to defend the controversial “Operation Border Guardian” program that took more than 100 Central American women and children from their homes in two days of immigration raids last January. According to a lawsuit filed this week by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the law firm […]
This summer, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) in its lawsuit seeking the disclosure of unredacted versions of complaints filed against immigration judges. To date, the government has refused to turn over the names, locations, and genders of immigration judges against whom complaints […]
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that the 1997 settlement in Flores v. Reno—which governs the detention, treatment and release of immigrant children—covers both unaccompanied and accompanied minors. This was a direct repudiation of the position the government took while defending its family detention policies in court. The government argued that the Flores […]
Two years ago, the American Immigration Council released an analysis of data it had obtained from the Department of Homeland Security detailing an utter lack of responsiveness to complaints filed against agents employed by United States Border Patrol. In fact, the report, No Action Taken: Lack of CBP Accountability in Responding to Complaints of Abuse […]
Each year, U.S. employers seeking highly skilled foreign professional workers submit petitions on the first business day of April to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for the limited pool of H-1B nonimmigrant visa numbers available for the coming fiscal year, which are capped at 65,000 for new hires and 20,000 for those who graduate […]
For more than a decade, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been criticized for the inadequate medical care available in its detention facilities, which has had deadly repercussions. This week, two more people died while in ICE custody—Jose Leonardo Lemus Rajo, 23, of El Salvador and Igor Zyazin, 46, of Russia. Rajo, who was in […]
A class action lawsuit was recently filed by three immigration attorneys and eleven noncitizens challenging U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) nationwide practice of failing to respond to requests for case information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in a timely manner. Brown et al. v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection alleges that routine […]
