U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection urged a Washington, D.C., federal judge Wednesday to deny a quick win in a Freedom of Information Act suit seeking access to immigration databases, arguing that the data are exempt from disclosure.
The two plaintiffs, statistics professor Susan B. Long and journalist and research professor David Burnham, argued in a November brief that the two agencies failed to demonstrate that the withheld records are exempt under Exemption 7(E), but the agencies replied that the plaintiffs' challenges to the FOIA provision are mistaken and that they lack the personal knowledge regarding the databases to support their allegations.
The plaintiffs filed the suit in January 2014, alleging that the two agencies improperly withheld records responsive to FOIA requests. They had asked for technical documents relating to ICE's Enforcement Integrated Database and Integrated Decision Support Database, and other technical documentation from certain ICE and CBP databases. Continue>>>
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