ICE Sued for Concealing Criminal Illegal Aliens’ Identities in Press Releases
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is being sued by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) over what the institute calls a “lack of transparency” regarding the names of illegal alien criminals, and for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
“Recently, ICE began omitting the names of immigration violators it has arrested from agency press releases,” IRLI stated in a press release announcing the suit. The institute claims that this makes it “virtually impossible for journalists and researchers to locate information relevant to ICE enforcement actions.”
The institute filed a FIOA request for specific records revealing the identities of arrested illegal aliens in July 2023. Though the agency legally had 20 working days to respond, eight months later, IRLI was not provided with any information, which the institute says warranted the lawsuit to “compel production.”
According to a report published by the IRLI in February, ICE historically published the names, nationalities, and other “relevant details” of illegal aliens arrested and deemed “a dangerous criminal, a threat to national security, or a prodigious violator of U.S. immigration law.”
However, over the past three years, ICE has only provided the name of the individual taken into custody in 65% of its press releases. “[In] that 67 percent of cases where the alien was referred to by name, he/she had typically been named with by state or local law enforcement, or the media.”
This varies significantly from the policies employed by the agency from 2017 to 2021 when ICE published the names of criminal immigrants in 97% of its press releases.
“The refusal to provide names and other details about arrested aliens have grave implications for government transparency,” IRLI wrote. “It makes it virtually impossible to determine whether the individual identified in a press release was later convicted of a crime and/or deported from the United States.”
Noting the drastic disparities, the institute filed the FOIA request, hoping to gain access to “All policies, rules and procedures concerning the publication of names” in ICE press releases, and “emails from or to ICE leadership that pertain to any police, rule or procedure related to publicizing names, or not publicizing names, in agency news releases and statements.”
In the fiscal year 2024 alone, which began in October 2023, 576 noncitizens have been arrested on assault and battery charges, 363 on burglary, robbery, or theft, 1,496 for driving under the influence, 18 for homicide and manslaughter, 119 for sexual offenses, and more than 7,000 have been arrested on various other charges, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
