Federal Judge: What Is Homeland Security Hiding On Immigrant Detentions?

The Associated Press reports that in a new decision on Monday, US District Judge Richard Berman wrote that the Department of Homeland Security “continues, quite obviously, to drag its heels in providing disclosure about immigrant detention” by insisting that it could not provide the 22,000 files on immigrant detainees which the ACLU had requested in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition over five years ago. “Hopefully,” Berman wrote, “it is not also trying to hide or obscure a distressing system or set of facts,” adding that the government had made “very unpersuasive arguments” as to why it could not comply with the ACLU petition.

Under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, any person has a legal right to obtain access to the records of any federal agency, unless those records fall into a number of special exemption categories. In 2011, years after the ACLU filed the original FOIA petition, the organization sued the government in federal court in an attempt to force it to release the files. The ACLU maintains a sharply critical stance on Homeland Security’s detention practices, which it says unnecessarily exposes hundreds of thousands of detainees to “brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers”.

In a Sept. 9 ruling in 2013, Berman ordered the DHS to produce the requested documents. The agency said in a November letter to Berman that it could only provide 100 of the 22,000 files, then requested a further delay on Dec. 25, protesting that the original order was “not feasible” and saying it could hand over sample of 385 files within eight weeks. On Monday, Berman questioned whether the resources spent on fighting his earlier order “would not better and more usefully be directed to providing appropriate public disclosure of information regarding the underlying problems of immigrant detention” and asked whether "simply sought to move the goal posts."

The AP notes that in 2009, an investigation it carried out with a computer analysis of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement database found that more than 18,000 of the 32,000 immigrants detained had no criminal convictions, while some 400 of them had languished in jail for over a year despite a 2001 Supreme Court ruling recommending that detained immigrants be released or deported within six months.