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Since late December, J. Dale Shoemaker, a reporter for the Investigative Post, a nonprofit newsroom based in Buffalo, has filed seventeen Freedom of Information Act requests with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection to guide his deep dives into federal law enforcement activity, deportation actions, and ICE detention centers in upstate New York. In return, he says, he has gotten only documents that were redacted beyond comprehension, or nothing at all. “I have not received a satisfactory response to a single one of them,” Shoemaker said.
Ryanne Mena, of the Los Angeles Daily News, sent ICE a FOIA request on January 24 for all grievance forms filed by detainees at facilities in Adelanto, California, between 2016 and early 2025. Nearly eight months later, she said, she’s received nothing: ICE “has failed to provide me with an estimated date of production despite repeated requests.”
Monica Eng, a reporter for Axios, filed a FOIA request with ICE in February, seeking data she hoped would inform stories about where and why agents were apprehending people in Illinois. At first, she said, ICE officials appeared willing to cooperate. But by March, ICE had denied Eng’s request in full, citing “ongoing law enforcement investigations.” Axios filed an administrative appeal with ICE, but hasn’t received a response. “I have filed a lot of FOIAs, and my requests to the Trump Department of Homeland Security have been some of the least successful and least transparent,” Eng said.
ICE and CBP have become centerpieces of President Donald Trump’s quest to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from US soil through aggressive law enforcement tactics and billions of dollars in new federal funding. But CJR spoke to nearly two dozen reporters, editors, and other people at news organizations and open-records watchdog groups across the country who have filed FOIA requests with the agencies, and who say that ICE and CBP officials routinely deny or ignore those requests. The agencies have never been particularly open with the press, but many reporters believe that their experience is part of an enhanced effort by the Trump administration to conceal immigration agency operations, even in possible violation of federal law. Some also described the agencies’ press offices as functionally useless, with media officials providing few, if any, answers to even their most basic of inquiries.
Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, a nonprofit organization that advocates for public access to government records, said ICE and Border Protection have an “abysmal” track record of transparency. Of 137 requests her group has filed with ICE and CBP over the course of 2025, there has been a “substantive response” to just one—“and that took almost seven months,” Chukwu said. “ICE and CBP remain among the slowest and least transparent agencies we deal with, routinely flouting FOIA’s requirements and denying the public timely access to information about their operations.”
This stonewalling comes at a time when ICE—and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security—has repeatedly cracked down on journalism about its operations. The department has described the video recording of ICE agents as “violence,” with a department spokesperson promising to prosecute those who “illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” Multiple reporters have been arrested or injured while covering protests or anti-ICE rallies, including Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara, who was detained while covering a rally in Georgia in June, and Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi, who was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet as she reported on an anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles. In early September, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering DHS to stop using “nonlethal” weapons against journalists. “Under the guise of protecting the public, federal agents have endangered large numbers of peaceful protesters, legal observers, and journalists—as well as the public that relies on them to hold their government accountable,” the judge wrote. “The First Amendment demands better.”
Some news outlets told CJR they believe that, in ICE’s and CBP’s handling of their FOIA requests, the agencies are themselves violating federal law by ignoring statutory deadlines or failing to respond altogether. By law, government agencies must determine within twenty business days whether to fulfill or deny a FOIA request and “immediately notify” the requester of their decision. Agencies may also extend this deadline because of “unusual circumstances.” If fulfilling a FOIA request requires significant time, agencies are required by law to offer requesters an “opportunity to arrange with the agency an alternative time frame for processing the request or a modified request.” Requesters have the right to appeal agencies’ FOIA determinations, and if all else fails, they may sue the government in federal court.
Several media organizations have done just that this year, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian. “Suing is the process at this point because they literally don’t respond any other way,” said Mick Dumke, investigative editor for Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit news organization that sued ICE in May to obtain federal records about immigration enforcement actions in the Chicago area during Trump’s first ten days in office. In Block Club’s case, legal action worked, at least in part: ICE released a list of area detentions and bookings but redacted key information such as detainees’ names, times of arrest, and the locations where they were being held. Block Club Chicago’s lawsuit is ongoing.
“ICE has long had an official policy to not comply with FOIA, and we have had to file lawsuits to obtain access,” said Susan Long, a cofounder of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which has itself filed numerous immigration-related FOIA requests this year. “The issue with the Border Patrol is primarily a problem with inadequate staffing,” she added. Asked about her organization’s success rate in obtaining responsive documents in a reasonable period of time, Long said, “Close to zero.”
In response to a series of written questions, ICE spokesperson Miguel Alvarez said in early September that his agency was working to “have some information to you shortly.” As of publication, ICE had not provided any information. CBP officials did not respond to repeated phone and email inquiries.
The two agencies do post some of what they call “essential records and information” in online FOIA reading rooms, as well as “accountability and transparency” or “library” webpages. In recent days, for example, ICE has released detention facility contract documents and spreadsheets listing details about arrests and deportations. But the spreadsheets lack key information about the people involved, such as their names, birth dates, and case numbers—data that would typically be available in police reports generated by local or state agencies. In CBP’s online library, a section for “body-worn camera video releases” contains only two such videos from 2025.
At the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters, reporters Wendy Fry and Sergio Olmos did obtain a spreadsheet of the criminal histories—or, in many cases, the lack thereof—of CBP detainees in Kern County, California. “I basically annoyed them into giving us the spreadsheet,” Fry said. After their story came out, the government went cold: Fry says she hasn’t been able to reach FOIA officials by phone since late April, despite many attempts across multiple other FOIA requests. Reporters Doug Livingston of the Marshall Project, Evan Goodenow of the Loudoun Times-Mirror in Virginia, and Nancy Guan at WUSF-FM in Tampa described similar radio silence in respect to their FOIA requests.
Some reporters say that in the wake of limited government responses, they’re doubling down on shoe-leather reporting and community engagement to tell immigration stories. Bloomberg News reporter Mike McDonald filed a FOIA request early this year with ICE, seeking records about charter flights used to remove migrants from the United States. The agency denied his request for expedited processing, “and I never heard back after that,” he said. The story he ultimately wrote—“Airline at Center of Brazil Fiasco Key to Trump’s Deportations”—relied on the airline’s public financial filings, rather than documents obtained by FOIA.
Jenna McMurtry, of Jackson Hole Community Radio, took another approach: stifled by a “frustrating” lack of communication from ICE about a local enforcement operation, including no response to a FOIA request, she wrote an article and broadcast a report in March about that very obfuscation. “It was greatly appreciated by our audience,” McMurtry said. “We want to be able to understand who ICE wants when they come to town.” (In mid-September, ICE finally produced records responsive to McMurtry’s FOIA request, but they’re “mostly redacted,” she said. Her newsroom is still considering next steps.)
But for many, the grind of daily newswork or limited resources makes protracted FOIA fights impractical. “I haven’t followed up. Way too busy with other stuff,” said Denver Post reporter John Aguilar, when asked about his February FOIA request seeking information about ICE detainees arrested by the agency’s Denver field office. Mark Keierleber, an investigative reporter for The 74, an education-focused digital news site, said, “For a small, nonprofit outlet like The 74, filing FOIA lawsuits really isn’t in the cards. Sometimes I wish it was.”
Luke Harold, a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, said he had a “productive conversation” with one of ICE’s FOIA officials in February about amending a request seeking records about tunnels below the US-Mexico border. But, Harold said, he hasn’t heard anything since. He filed the same request with Border Protection, which he said hasn’t communicated at all save for an automated email receipt of his request. “The only aspect of FOIA that has been efficient, for me, is rejection,” Harold said.
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