The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania and Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic have filed litigation against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to obtain documents that agents use to record the circumstances of civil immigration enforcement.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania seeks injunctive and other appropriate relief requiring ICE to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sent by the plaintiffs, and to promptly disclose the requested records concerning immigration enforcement in the Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia regions.
The FOIA request concerned all Form I-213s (“Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien”) prepared by any agent between Jan. 1, 2017 and the present.
I-213s are completed by an ICE officer after arresting an individual and explain the reasons and the procedures used in the arrest.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University shows that the office’s arrest numbers raised considerably after after President Trump’s term began. The increase was from over 3,000 arrests in 2016 to more than 4,000 in 2017. In the first six months of 2018 alone, ICE’s Philadelphia field office arrested 2,995 people.
The suit and various media reports state ICE’s Philadelphia field office is one of the most active offices in the country and allege that its officers have participated in questionable activities, including trespassing, warrantless searches and racial profiling.
“The requested records contain information of great public importance, especially in light of defendant’s aggressive enforcement actions under the current presidential administration,” the suit states.
“The public has a right to know about the Defendant’s local enforcement operations, including their tactics and how they conduct collateral arrests,”it added.
On Aug. 7, 2019, the plaintiffs submitted their FOIA request to ICE via e-mail and an application for a waiver. The request was denied on Aug. 27, appealed by the plaintiffs on Sept. 17, and finally denied for the second time as “unduly burdensome” on Oct. 16, the suit says.
“ICE doesn’t get to act in secret, and they don’t get to act outside the boundaries of the law. But here, they are failing to follow the Freedom Of Information Act in order to avoid public scrutiny of their behavior. It’s time for court intervention,” said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
“We have documented numerous instances of ICE engaging in racial profiling and terrorizing Pennsylvania residents across the state. Communities can’t hold ICE accountable if they don’t know how they carry out their activities,” added Caitlin Barry, director of the Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law.
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