New Data on ICE FOIA Administrative Decisions

Information on FOIA decisions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now available on FOIAproject.org. The period of coverage for this ICE data is from October 1, 2010 through August 2012. Data will be updated on an ongoing basis as additional records arrive. This expansion was funded by grants from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the William B. Wiener, Jr. Foundation.

We plan to expand coverage of FOIA administrative decisions in several ways. A new “Add Documents” tool has just been added to allow the public to upload examples of how their FOIA requests were handled by federal agencies. And we will be systematically adding coverage of additional agencies, similar to what we’ve done for ICE, over the coming year.

How This Information Was Obtained

Each month, we submit FOIA requests to agencies for their “augmented FOIA logs” — information about each FOIA request the agency processed that month, including all request-specific data on which the agency will rely in compiling its end-of-year annual FOIA report.

Once the information is received, we process the files, compile the information into searchable databases, and add various tags to make it easier to analyze the data. We then summarize the data and develop a variety of statistics we use to measure agency performance.

Here is a detailed description of the information available on each FOIA request.

How to Access FOIA Request Data on ICE

Several tools are available to help you find, list, analyze and expand on the FOIA request data we’ve compiled. Here’s what we’ve got:

• Search requests. Case search tools let you search our data archives by the name and organization of the requestor, by the nature of the records requested, by the FOIA case tracking number, as well as various processing categories (fiscal year, requestor type, processing track, fee waiver, expedited, and subject type).
• Detail listing. From the results of your search, you can drill down to a detailed listing of the information we have for that request.
• Decisions by the numbers. Use this unique application to examine statistics on agency decisions and performance.
• Add documents. You are encouraged to upload correspondence concerning any FOIA request, such as the original request submission, the agency response(s), and administrative appeals. It is not necessary that the request be part of our existing inventory; we encourage interested users to extend coverage by sharing how any agency handled their request.