11/27/2025
Greetings. This installment of immigration disclosures highlights a new lawsuit on immigration courthouse arrests, a post breaking down the Council’s FOIA request to compel ICE to show the public its training materials for local law enforcement agencies that signed 287(g) agreements, and the Council’s new Family Separation Platform that gives viewers an immersive experience into the intentional chaos created by the first Trump administration’s implementation of the zero-tolerance policy and the struggle for oversight and accountability.
Initial Disclosures:
The American Immigration Council and LatinoJustice PRLDEF, with the help of Democracy Forward, filed a lawsuit on October 15 to compel EOIR and ICE to respond to our request under FOIA about ICE arrests at immigration courts. Since May 20, 2025, immigration enforcement agencies have been taking part in a coordinated effort to detain noncitizens appearing for hearings in immigration courts nationwide. Seeking to better understand how and why arrests at immigration courts are taking place, we filed 11 FOIA requests with EOIR and ICE, but the agencies failed to properly respond. Read our lawsuit here.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order encouraging local law enforcement agencies to aid in federal government’s immigration arrests by signing cooperation agreements under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This section allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement so they can perform certain immigration enforcement actions. In September, the Council and New York Civil Union Liberties (NYCLU) filed a FOIA request for the materials ICE uses to train local officers who have assumed duties under 287(g) agreements. The Council and the NYCLU just released an Instagram post breaking down the issue. Read more about our FOIA request here.
The Council Releases Platform Featuring Documents and Analysis Obtained from Zero Tolerance Policy
Last week, the Council released a platform providing new perspectives into family separations during the implementation of the first Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. This platform allows readers to understand how the administration’s decision-making process was affected by outside levers, and to compare the administration’s public comments against internal agency correspondence. In April 2018, the Council, Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in Need of Defense, and Women’s Refugee Commission filed a FOIA request on the Trump administration’s implementation of its zero-tolerance policy—a policy that led to the separation of thousands of children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Back in 2020, the Council released a web report featuring documents obtained from the FOIA request to demonstrate how poorly designed, harmful, and cruel the Trump administration policy was.
The new platform explores three key themes: the role of journalists in exposing the harms and failures of the family separation policy; internal watchdogs and congressional offices’ attempts to hold the administration accountable; and the government’s negligent record-keeping of family separations. Journalists played a key role in bringing the stories of people affected by the cruelties of the policy to light. FOIA records demonstrate how closely journalists worked with public defenders and attorneys to highlight the tragedies their clients suffered. Government agencies recorded the injustices separated families experienced and initiated inquiries into the government’s actions in implementing the policy. These investigations corroborated stories of the thousands of parents separated from their children. The role of oversight agencies and congressional offices mainly remained investigatory, but the integrated public outrage and oversight levers of government placed pressure on government agencies, which contributed to the end of the policy. The platform not only highlights key documents demonstrating these efforts, but includes an interview with Jorge Loweree, the Council’s Managing Director of Programs, who worked as a congressional staffer in 2018 and helped reunite separated families. We will be releasing more interviews and audio content in the coming months.
Furthermore, records reveal serious flaws in government record-keeping around family separation. The documents show that the agencies’ insufficient records on separated families were not simply due to an erroneous database complication, but to Border Patrol’s own distorted record-keeping. Separated children were inaccurately categorized as “unaccompanied minors” rather than as “family units.” As a result, hundreds of children were “lost in the system,” with no way of reuniting them with their parents. Documents also point to missing and inconsistent records; a lack of communication between and across agencies; difficulties in pulling records from the database; and, most importantly, improper documentation by Border Patrol when encountering families. The platform not only exposes the chaos caused by the inadequate record-keeping but provides users the opportunity to delve into the record-keeping issues through data interactives.
