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Administrative Law Keyed to Schwartz
American Immigration Lawyers Association v. Executive Office for Immigration Review
Citation:
830 F.3d 667 (2016)Facts
The American Immigration Lawyers Association submitted a FOIA request to the Department of Justice seeking information about complaints filed against immigration judges, including the complaints themselves, records reflecting their resolution, and reasons for resolving them. After filing a lawsuit due to the agency’s failure to respond, EOIR began disclosing documents, eventually providing 16,000 pages encompassing 767 complaint files. However, EOIR redacted all immigration judges’ names under Exemption 6, claiming their privacy interests outweighed any public interest in disclosure. EOIR assigned each judge a unique three-digit code to allow tracking of patterns. Additionally, EOIR redacted information it deemed non-responsive to the request, even when that information appeared within responsive records. AILA challenged both types of redactions and also argued that complaint resolution decisions should be affirmatively disclosed under FOIA regardless of any request.
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