The Trump administration is violating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to release documents related to “politically motivated” immigration enforcement and mass deportations, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Washington, D.C.
In a 30-page complaint, American Oversight, a transparency-focused nonprofit organization, accuses various departments and government agencies of repeatedly violating FOIA law on multiple requests in recent months.
“The American people deserve full transparency about what’s driving this administration’s sweeping immigration raids,” American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
“From arrests in schools and churches to raids on small businesses and farms, the administration’s immigration enforcement has disproportionately targeted our most vulnerable — including children, low-income workers, and immigrant communities.”
The filing depicts an immigration agenda disguised as public safety and used to enforce President Donald Trump’s political agenda while rewarding his allies.
“American Oversight brings this action in response to the Trump Administration’s mass deportation efforts, which have become increasingly aggressive, sweeping, and — by the President’s own tacit admission — politically motivated,” the accusation reads.
“Specifically, he has directed immigration enforcement agencies ‘to do everything in their power’ to detain and deport undocumented immigrants in ‘America’s largest cities,’ which the President describes as the ‘core of the Democrat Power Center.’
In doing so, he invoked unfounded conspiracy theories about non-citizen voting, revealing that these efforts are motivated by partisan interests rather than public safety concerns.
The group uses a slew of immigration-related news to make its case about the government’s immigration enforcement priorities.
According to the plaintiffs, the Trump administration signaled a focus on deporting criminals while detaining college students and visa holders in high-profile cases, before shifting enforcement priorities away from the agricultural and hospitality industries and back again in response to political pressure.
American Oversight states that its mission was “to shed light on the Administration’s shifting immigration enforcement priorities, the political considerations driving those actions, and the internal decision-making processes behind this unprecedented escalation in immigration enforcement.”
The lawsuit stems from a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. The first was sent to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on January 28.
According to the lawsuit, the FOIA request was for a series of communications to and from various DHS officials that included references to keywords and terms such as “school,” “university,” “place of worship,” “mosque,” “temple,” “synagogue,” “sensitive zone,” “protected area,” “community zone,” and others.
To help contextualize the request and assist the records custodian in limiting the number of responses, the FOIA request clarified.
