Trump Admin Withholds Records Immigrants Need to Stay in US
NEWS & RESEARCH
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) receives more than 2,000 requests a day under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the federal law that gives the public the right to obtain government records. Nearly all come from people seeking their own immigration files, which can contain the evidence that determines whether they may remain in the US. That paperwork is especially crucial for those with upcoming immigration hearings. But according to nearly three dozen immigration lawyers interviewed by The New York Times, the Trump administration has been withholding those documents at a strikingly high rate, and releasing others so heavily redacted that they are all but useless. In February 2026, Cipriano Alarcon-Galvez, a Mexican national who has lived in California for decades and has four US-citizen daughters, asked USCIS for a copy of a green-card petition his mother, a naturalized US citizen, filed on his behalf in 1993. It could make him eligible for permanent residency and for relief from penalties for entering the country without permission as a child. Yet more than half of the records he received were fully redacted, and he now faces deportation. Meanwhile, Gregory Luce, founder of the Adoptee Rights Law Center, has spent years filing FOIA requests for clients born abroad and adopted as children by US citizens. According to data Luce collected, USCIS has redacted or withheld more than 80 percent of the documents requested for his clients since April 2025, up from an average of about 10 percent the year before. The timing is no coincidence. Timothy Turner, a former senior USCIS official, alleged in a whistleblower complaint to Congress that the agency adopted policies early in President Trump's second term that made it harder for immigrants to obtain documents to which they are legally entitled. In May 2025, Turner says, staff were ordered to withhold all documents in languages other than English, along with marriage certificates, joint bank statements, tax forms and portions of immigration court transcripts. He also said the agency denied requests over minor name discrepancies even after locating the relevant records, for example when a person's official records showed a hyphenated surname but the request listed only one of the two names. In August 2026, Turner testified that between September 2025 and March 2026, USCIS closed more than 35 percent of requests from immigrants facing deportation without providing any documents, up from about 8 percent in the previous six months. Even when records were released, critical information was often blacked out.
SOURCES: New York Times | Latin Times | Government Executive | Adoptee Rights Law Center
ANALYSIS & OPINION
Federal law guarantees immigrants facing deportation access to records "pertaining to [their] admission or presence" in the United States (8 U.S.C. § 1229a), and the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552) lets anyone request their own immigration file. Thus, Alarcon-Galvez's lawyer, Caroline Matthews, calls USCIS's refusal to release his documents "almost like a joke." FOIA allows the government to withhold personal information only when releasing it would be a "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy," yet many of the withheld records are ones immigrants gave the government themselves. Whose privacy is protected when a person is denied a copy of their own marriage certificate? Kelly Rojas, a pro bono lawyer at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, put it plainly: "Delays and redactions pile on to the many other intentional ways immigrants are being deprived of due process in immigration court." This therefore appears to be yet another tactic in the Trump administration's push to restrict immigration and expand deportations, since people who can't get their paperwork are often deported. When Turner, the whistleblower, objected internally, his director told him it "doesn't cost" immigrants anything to file another request, but Turner says, "Imagine being the one who has to refile: in detention, your hearing three weeks away, your defense potentially sitting in a file the government has and you don't. From there, the cost looks very different." Others, like Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tougher immigration policies, argue that immigrants can sue if they believe their requests were wrongly rejected. But many have neither the money nor the time to wait for a court ruling; Alarcon-Galvez's FOIA appeal won't even be processed until five months after his deportation hearing. As a result, The New York Times reports, many immigrants with "plausible pathways for stable immigration status" are simply giving up and risking deportation, which may be exactly what USCIS intends. Meanwhile, USCIS sometimes claims it can't find documents that immigrants and their lawyers know exist, and that the agency clearly has. When immigration lawyer Zachary Kohn requested records for a Salvadoran client whose green card was denied over a 25-year-old deportation order she didn't know about, officials said they had none. Once he sued, the records suddenly turned up, but the government would release them only if he dropped the lawsuit. That tactic may also be illegal: FOIA requires agencies to conduct a reasonable search for records (5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(C)), and documents that appear the moment a lawsuit is filed suggest no real search was done the first time.
SOURCES: New York Times | Latin Times | Government Executive | Adoptee Rights Law Center
HOW TO FIX IT
Federal action:
Pass the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act and close its loophole. Despite the name, the bill applies to everyone in removal proceedings, not just children. It would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hand over a person's complete immigration file within seven days of the notice to appear, with no FOIA request needed, and the case would be delayed if DHS doesn't comply. But the bill exempts any documents "protected from disclosure under section 552(b)," which includes the same FOIA privacy exemptions USCIS is using now. Congress should amend it so those exemptions can't be used to withhold a person's own records or documents they gave the government. Otherwise the redactions will continue under the new law.
Pass the Privacy Act Modernization Act. Right now, the Privacy Act only gives U.S. citizens and green-card holders a legal right to their own government records. Everyone else has to go through FOIA, where agencies can redact information in the name of third-party privacy. This bill would extend the Privacy Act to anyone "in the United States."
Amend FOIA so the government can't cite "privacy" to hide a person's own records from them. FOIA's privacy exemptions (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(6) and (b)(7)(C)) were written to protect third parties, like a stranger requesting someone else's file. USCIS is now using them against the people the records are about. Congress should add language barring agencies from using these exemptions to withhold information about the requester, documents the requester gave the government, or shared documents like marriage certificates and joint bank statements, since the requester already knows what's in them.
Amend FOIA to ban closing requests over paperwork technicalities. FOIA only requires that a request "reasonably describe" the records sought and follow the agency's published procedures (5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(A)). But agencies have used those procedures to throw out requests because a surname is formatted differently or a birth date is written day-first. Congress should add language to that section with two requirements: (1) once an agency has located the records, or can reasonably identify the requester, it must process the request; and (2) before closing any request as deficient, it must notify the requester, explain the problem and give them time to fix it. Closing requests would be allowed only when identity genuinely can't be confirmed.
To give this teeth, Congress could add that an improperly closed request will keep its original filing date and count as a missed deadline. That would let the requester go straight to court (§ 552(a)(6)(C)(i)) and make the agency pay their legal fees.
Write fast-track processing for people facing deportation into FOIA. On paper, DHS already lets people with upcoming immigration hearings skip the line, through its regulations and a 2007 USCIS policy. But those are the agency's own rules, which it can rewrite or ignore, and Turner's numbers suggest that's exactly what's happening. FOIA itself guarantees fast-tracking only for threats to life or safety, or for urgent news (5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(6)(E)(v)). Congress should add pending deportation cases and detention to that list, with a legal deadline to hand over records before the hearing.
Require USCIS to publicly report how many requests it closes, rejects or fully withholds, not just how fast it answers. Turner says the agency met court-ordered deadlines on paper by mass-closing requests, since a closure counts as an on-time response under Nightingale v. USCIS. Congress can require monthly public data that separates real releases from closures, "no records" replies and fully blacked-out files. The fastest way to do this is to attach the requirement to DHS's annual funding bill, for example by withholding part of USCIS's budget until it publishes the data. But funding rules expire each year, so to make it permanent, Congress should add it to the annual reports FOIA already requires every agency to publish (5 U.S.C. § 552(e)).
Amend FOIA so agencies pay when records appear only after a lawsuit. When Kohn sued for his client's records, the government offered to hand them over only if he dropped the case. Deals like that let USCIS off the hook. It never has to admit it wrongly withheld the records or pay the immigrant's legal fees, which in Kohn's case ran into the thousands. Right now, courts “may” order the government to pay those fees but don't have to (5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E)). Congress should change FOIA's fee rule from "may" to "shall" whenever records are released only after a lawsuit, even if the case is dropped, and bar agencies from making people give up those fees in exchange for their records.
Litigation:
Enforce the Nightingale court order. In 2020, a federal judge ordered USCIS to answer immigrants' FOIA requests on time (Nightingale v. USCIS). Turner's evidence suggests the agency met that order on paper by mass-closing requests. The court will now weigh whether USCIS is complying, at a hearing scheduled for October 2026 on a motion to enforce the order. The court should count closures, "no records" replies and fully blacked-out files as violations and order the closed requests reopened.
Force USCIS to release its internal rules. The American Immigration Council sued USCIS in February 2026 for the guidance the agency uses to process immigration file requests, and for proof of the searches behind its "no records" replies. Winning would expose the directives Turner described and give every other case its paper trail.
Win Luce's lawsuit for his adoptee clients. In July, Luce sued USCIS on behalf of about two dozen adoptees whose records were redacted or withheld. A win would get them the documents they need to prove their status, and it would show other lawyers the redactions can be beaten in court.
File a class action against USCIS's blanket withholding policies. A class action lets a few people sue on behalf of everyone in the same situation, so a single ruling could force USCIS to change its policy for all requesters, not just the plaintiffs. The case could argue that FOIA's privacy exemptions require case-by-case review, not blanket bans on marriage certificates or tax forms, and that agencies must show "foreseeable harm" before withholding information under them. It could also argue that no exemption allows withholding a document because it isn't in English.
Sue under the Privacy Act on behalf of citizens and green-card holders denied their own records. Unlike undocumented immigrants, they have a legal right to their files and can sue when refused (5 U.S.C. § 552a(g)(1)(B)). International adoptees requesting adoption papers and their parents’ citizenship documents may be the strongest plaintiffs.
Challenge DHS's closure rule under the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies make policy and requires a public comment period on most new rules. When DHS gave itself the power to close records requests it deems incomplete in December 2025, it skipped that step, instead calling the change "procedural," with "minimal substantive effect on the public.”
Take the Dent v. Holder ruling nationwide. In 2010, a federal appeals court ruled that federal law, backed by the Constitution's due process guarantee, requires the government to hand over a person's immigration file in deportation cases, without a FOIA request. The ruling only applies in nine Western states. Lawyers elsewhere should appeal deportation orders issued when the file is withheld. Meanwhile, they can ask immigration judges to subpoena the file (8 C.F.R. § 1003.35(b)) and pause the case until it arrives.
Legislation: S.1297 - Fair Day in Court for Kids Act of 2025 | S.1208 - Privacy Act Modernization Act of 2025
