ACLU Immigrants' Rts. Project v. ICE, No. 21-1233 (2d Cir. 2023)
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Plaintiff American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project (“ACLU”) brought a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) suit in district court to compel Defendant, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), to produce agency records in the form of electronic spreadsheet data pertaining to five stages of the immigration enforcement and deportation process. ICE produced 21 spreadsheets of responsive data but did not comply with ACLU’s request to replace exempt Alien Identification Numbers (“A-Numbers”) on such spreadsheets with anonymized unique identifiers (“Unique IDs”). ACLU submits that such Unique IDs could be any combinations of numbers, letters, or symbols that, while meaningless in themselves, would allow ACLU to track datapoints pertaining to individual (but unidentified) aliens across ICE databases. The district court granted ICE’s motion for summary judgment, ruling that ACLU’s requested substitution effectively required ICE to create new records.
The Second Circuit reversed the award of summary judgment to ICE and remanded. The court reasoned that by redacting A-Numbers from the spreadsheets, it produced conveying datapoints by event rather than by person, ICE not only shielded the FOIA-exempt personal identifying information (“PII”) documented by the A-Numbers but also effectively deprived the public of access to nonexempt records in the same person-centric manner available to the agency. The court explained that the substitution of Unique IDs for A-Numbers does not create any new agency records and is a reasonable step to shield the exempt content of A-Numbers while preserving the function necessary to afford public access to non-exempt records in the same person-centric form or format available to the agency.
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