Jun 8
Fresh off the FOIA press.
Today, we received the following data on the total number of asylum grants and denials for each immigration judge from for each fiscal year from 2014 to 2018.
Recently, EOIR redacted just about all the relevant facts and law in a FOIA release of Immigration Judge Barry Pettinato’s decisions and BIA remands for the Fiscal Year 2017.
I thought the redactions may have been an error by a rookie specialist, but today I learned there was no mistake.
Here is the exchange with one of EOIR’s attorneys:
Here is the evidence proving EOIR’s claim–that the redactions for IJ Pettinato are consistent with other cases they’ve released–is false:
In a release of Immigration Judges Couch and Wilson, which occurred only a matter of months previous to the Pettinato release, the matter of A-R-C-G was referenced 212 and 65 times, respectively.
In IJ Pettinato’s release, the matter of A-R-C-G was referenced 0 times. Why?
Because EOIR decided to suddenly redact every reference to the matter of A-R-C-G- under a new policy, as set forth by EOIR’s attorney, that all ARCG references must be redacted because “that would be an indicator the alien is connected to a particular social group.”
See the searches conducted below for “A-R-C-G”:
May 24
I’m speechless. I hope this is is a mistake.
If it is not a mistake, the leadership in the Department of Justice has commandeered EOIR to unlawfully withhold information on…everything.
Almost all the cites to BIA and Circuit Court decisions are redacted under the (b)(6) exemption, which is supposed to protect private personal information. The title to a published BIA decision is about as far from personal information as it gets.
Further, all of the relevant facts underlying the decisions are redacted. One literally cannot determine, at all, what happened in any of the cases, and why the BIA remanded the case.
See for yourself:
