Case Detail
| Case Title | MEZERHANE DE SCHNAPP v. UNITED STATES CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| District | District of Columbia | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| City | Washington, DC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Number | 1:2013cv01461 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Filed | 2013-09-25 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Closed | 2015-09-02 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Judge | Judge John D. Bates | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plaintiff | MARIA ANDREA MEZERHANE DE SCHNAPP | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Description | Maria Andrea Mezerhane de Schnapp, a citizen of Venezuela living in Florida, filed for asylum in 2010 and her application remains pending. She submitted a FOIA request to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for her complete alien file. The agency responded by indicating it had located 402 records and was releasing 181 records in full and 64 records in part, and withholding 119 records entirely under Exemption 5 (privileges), Exemption 6 (invasion of privacy), Exemption 7(C) (invasion of privacy concerning law enforcement records) and Exemption 7(E) (investigative methods and techniques). Mezerhane de Schnapp appealed the agency's decision and the agency decided to release an additional 62 pages with redactions under Exemption 6. Mezerhane de Schnapp then filed suit. Complaint issues: conduct adequate search, disclosure of non-exempt records by date certain, production of Vaughn index, attorney's fees | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | UNITED STATES CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Documents | Docket Complaint Complaint attachment 1 Opinion/Order [26] FOIA Project Annotation: Although he found that the agency's Exemption 5 (privileges) claim for withholding records pertaining to Maria Andrea Mezerhane de Schnapp's asylum application might be appropriate, Judge John Bates has ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to provide supplemental submissions to rebut credible evidence from Mezerhane de Schnapp that because the agency had granted her application several years earlier the records constituted a final decision and were not protected by the deliberative process privilege. Mezerhane filed for asylum in August 2010. While USCIS insisted her application was not granted until November 2013 when the agency mailed a letter notifying her of its decision, Bates noted that Mezerhane had supplied considerable evidence casting doubt on this claim. Mezerhane's husband, Roberto Schnapp, had visited a USCIS filed office to inquire about his long-pending application for an "Advance Parole Travel Document," which is needed to travel abroad during a pending asylum application. Schnapp was a derivative beneficiary of Mezerhane's application and his asylum status was directly tied to hers. USCIS officials told Schnapp that he did not need the Advance Parole Travel Document because he had already been granted asylum under his wife's application. The USCIS officials showed Schnapp his case file and told him he needed a "Refugee Travel Document," a document available only to individuals who have already been granted asylum. Bates noted that the relevant USCIS records supported Schnapp's story. In October 2013, a staff member at the USCIS Ombudsman's office contacted the Merzerhane's attorney to inform her that the family no longer needed to apply for an Advance Parole Travel Document because they "already held asylum status." As confirmation, this USCIS official apparently located Mezerhane's case in the USCIS Refugee Asylum and Parole System database, which indicated Mezerhane's application for asylum had been granted in September 2010. Finally, after returning from a brief trip to the Bahamas in January 2014, a Customs and Border Protection officer pulled up the family's file and commented that the records showed they were "asylees since 2010." Faced with this contradiction, the agency argued the Mezerhane's evidence was hearsay. Bates observed that "this argument is meritless: the key out-of-court statements are from USCIS and [Department of Homeland Security] employees acting squarely within the scope of their employment, speaking on issues they are authorized to speak about. These statements are the admissions of a party-opponent�"not hearsay." The agency also claimed it regulations provided that a determination was not final until a letter was sent to the applicant notifying her of its decision. Bates, however, noted that "the regulation says no such thing�"it simply requires that '[t]he decision of an asylum officer to grant or to deny asylum. . .shall be communicated in writing to the applicant.' The regulation says nothing of timing or finality. And, in fact, Mezerhane's theory is that USCIS violated this regulation (at least its spirit, if not its letter), by waiting over three years to mail her a notice letter confirming that her asylum application had been granted." Assessing the relative merits of Mezerhane's contrary evidence, Bates pointed out that "there is evidence to support both parties' positions: statements from USCIS employees corroborate Mezerhane's assertion that the decision was made as early as September 2010, yet USCIS documents from early 2013 are written as if a final decision had not yet been made. Documents generated after a final decision are generally not 'pre-decisional' for purposes of the deliberative-process privilege, so this issue could very well be outcome-determinative (for these five pages of documents)." He observed that "to be sure, Mezerhane's evidence is not immune to skepticism; it is primarily based on unverifiable accounts of the plaintiff, her husband, and her attorney's recollections of conversations with (sometimes unnamed) government officials. For that reason, one might conclude that Mezerhane's evidence is not reliable, not credible, or both. Relying on this evidence is also in some tension with case law that instructs a district judge to treat the plaintiff's own self-serving affidavits with some skepticism�"even at the summary judgment stage." However, he noted that "USCIS does not deny that the conversations took place as remembered by the various affiants, and all of USCIS's legal arguments for ignoring this evidence have been rejected. And Mr. Schnapp's account is consistent with tangible, documentary evidence in the record." Bates concluded that "the bottom line is this: on the present record, one can come to more than one conclusion about when USCIS made a decision on Merzerhane's asylum application and, in turn, whether these documents are predecisional and protected by the deliberative-process privilege." Regardless of his questions concerning the agency's Exemption 5 claims, Bates, after examining the documents in camera, found that most of them were properly withheld under Exemption 7(E) (investigative methods and techniques) and Exemption 6 (invasion of privacy) and Exemption 7(C) (invasion of privacy concerning law enforcement records). He agreed that data from the agency's Enforcement Communications System (TECS II) database was created for law enforcement purposes and that its disclosure "could create the 'chance' of a 'risk' of circumvention of the law, because it would enlighten asylum applicants with criminal backgrounds about what sort of law enforcement information (from which databases) is consulted by USCIS during adjudication of a pending asylum application�"and, of course, by logical inference, what sort of information is not consulted." Mezerhane argued that she was a devoted mother with a spotless record. But Bates observed that "what matters is the risk of improper disclosure of law enforcement techniques and procedures, regardless of who wants the information." Turning to the privacy exemptions, Bates indicated that Mezerhane's allegations of agency misconduct in delaying her application had to be considered to determine if there was a legitimate public interest in disclosure of personal information. But after his in camera review, he pointed out that "quite simply, the withheld information neither confirms nor refutes Mezerhane's allegations of misconduct. . .Disclosure of the names of [the] individuals would not get Mezerhane any answers about possible agency misconduct, and would infringe upon the privacy interests of third parties not before the Court."
Opinion/Order [40]Issues: Exemption 7(E) - Unknown to public, Exemption 5 - Privileges - Waiver of privilege, Exemption 5 - Privileges - Deliberative process privilege - Predecisional, Litigation - In camera review FOIA Project Annotation: In a case that hinged upon whether documents that qualified as deliberative were also truly predecisional, Judge John Bates has ruled that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has satisfactorily explained that the disputed records were created before the agency's decision to grant asylum to Nelson Jose Mezerhane Gosen, his daughter Maria Andrea Mezerhane de Schnapp and their families. From the beginning of the litigation, the agency had insisted that its decision to grant asylum had not been made until November 2013 when the Mezerhane family received the official letter granting asylum. But because the Mezerhanes produced evidence that they were told by USCIS staff on several occasions that they had been granted asylum in 2010, Bates found the agency had not shown that the disputed documents were actually predecisional. This time, however, the agency provided Bates with an explanation that accounted for the difference in times. Bates noted that "it is clear that much of the process required to grant asylumâ€"not just a letter of notificationâ€"was not yet complete in September 2010. The vetting and security check process had yet to run its course. And many of the documents at issueâ€"which the Court has reviewed in cameraâ€"confirm that the internal vetting process was ongoing between 2010 and 2013. This vetting, a prerequisite for Headquarters review, was incomplete in 2010; the government, then, could not have made a truly final decision to grant the Mezerhanes asylum at that time." The agency concluded that the 2010 dates in several databases were the result of clerical error. Bates accepted that explanation, pointing out that "although this Court does not know for certain whether the database was a simple clerical error or a misguided employee decision, it is confident, given [the agency's supplemental declarations] that the 2010 entry did not reflect the final outcome of the official deliberative process required to grant asylum. Since that process was not completed until November 2013, when final Headquarters approval of asylum occurred, the documents are predecisional and protected under Exemption 5." Having reviewed the records in camera, Bates found that there was some factual material that could be disclosed. But he pointed out that "although the Court has highlighted several areas where there may be reasonably segregable material, it also recognizes that courts should give 'considerable deference' to an agency's judgment as to what constitutes" the agency's deliberative give and take. As a result, Bates indicated that "the Court will require the government to re-assess the remaining pages in dispute and disclose all reasonably segregable portions of non-exempt material."
Issues: Exemption 5 - Privileges - Deliberative process privilege - Predecisional | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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