Rubman v. United States Citizenship & Immigration Servs., No. 14-3733 (7th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CaseH-1B visas allow U.S. companies to hire noncitizen workers with specialized skills. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for their issuance. Rubman sent USCIS a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, 5 U.S.C. 552) seeking “copies of all documents reflecting statistics … about H-1B visa applications” from the last four years. USCIS responded with a single document: a data table that the agency had created to respond to his request. Rubman doubted the table’s accuracy and insisted that USCIS provide the documents he originally asked for: “‘ALL documents reflecting statistics’” about H-1B visa applications, including internal statistical reports and e-mails. CIS refused, insisting that additional records would not be helpful and would “only create additional confusion.” Rubman sued. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of USCIS. The Seventh Circuit reversed. An adequate search is one that was both performed in good faith and reasonably designed to uncover the requested records. USCIS failed to conduct an adequate search as required by law when it unilaterally narrowed Rubman’s request for “all documents” to a single, newly generated statistical table.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.