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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must disclose certain metadata from two databases relating to detention and removal operations, a D.C. federal court ruled, finding ICE improperly withheld information following a court-ordered analysis to sift out publicly releasable information.
Presiding over a more than decade-long Freedom of Information Act dispute, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Tuesday examined ICE's invocation of a law enforcement exemption under FOIA, which would prevent the disclosure of the metadata requested by Susan Long and the late David Burnham. The plaintiffs sued ICE in their roles as co-directors of Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the government data collection organization based out of Syracuse University.
Although Judge Mehta previously ruled that ICE could withhold the names of so-called primary and foreign keys, which identify how data in one table is linked to data in another table, he said on Tuesday that ICE must still release the "plain-English" translations of the keys, which are often abbreviated. For example, the plain-English translation for the data field "CSE_Aty_ID" is "attorney ID," he noted.
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