My clients’ own immigration records are typically available by request, with limited government interference. Recently, however, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is unreasonably withholding most of those records, making the job of securing and proving US citizenship for my clients maddeningly slow, difficult, and absurd.
The Issue
One of the common first steps in representing anyone in an immigration case is to request the client’s “A File” through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The A File typically contains the documented history of a client’s immigration to the United States, including documents that allow attorneys to determine the client’s status—i.e., whether they are already (or are not) a US citizen, what has occurred with prior filings, and what documents exist to support an application for an immigration benefit.
That process has now become unnecessarily and depressingly difficult. Beginning about a month ago, USCIS started to withhold and redact large portions of my clients’ A Files, sometimes withholding more than 80 percent of all pages in the file (here’s what that generally looks like). This includes ridiculous amounts of redaction and the withholding of entire pages from important records, such as adoption decrees, birth records, and previously filed immigration forms. The names of adoptive parents are also redacted from every page, even when the document is the adoptee’s own foreign or state-issued birth or adoption record.
The change can likely be traced to a 90-page legal memorandum that the Trump administration published in early March, which discussed one specific exemption used to justify the withholding and redacting of information for FOIA requests: the “(b)(6)” exemption. The (b)(6) exemption, which now makes up the vast majority of records withheld from me and my clients, applies to “personnel and medical files and similar files” when disclosure of such information “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Apparently, releasing my clients’ own adoption, birth, and immigration records—for which my client is almost alway the subject—is an “unwarranted invasion” of their adoptive parents’ privacy, no matter that the document is my clients’ own record and necessary to prove or secure US citizenship.
Applying the new standard to nearly all documents in an intercountry adoptee’s file is destructive. Gone now are any adoption decrees (or they are redacted so heavily as to be useless), copies of the adoptive parents’ birth records (necessary to show my client’s parents are US citizens), and any documents that can verify my client’s immigration status. Most of the time, however, we don’t even know what USCIS personnel removed from the file, as the page is left completely blank and notated with “PAGE WITHHELD PURSUANT TO B(6).”
This new interpretation and practice is unprecedented. In the last eight years of my work in this area, it was rare to see more than 5% of all pages in a file entirely withheld, and generally the reason was unrelated to the (b)(6) privacy exemption. Often it related to law enforcement records, such as fingerprints or criminal background checks of parents.
Today, the last ten cases I have handled have seen an average of 56 percent of all pages withheld from the file, with a high of 83 percent of all pages withheld in in one file (84 pages from a 101-page file). Prior to a few weeks ago, of the 62 FOIA requests I had completed since May 2024, an average of 2.4 percent of all pages were entirely withheld from the file.
What to Do?
Legally, I’m preparing to appeal, though an appeal will probably be lengthy and costly. In the interim, losing so many previously available documents will hinder my representation of intercountry adoptees (not to mention limiting documents that are often meaningful for my clients to understand their own histories). While my clients may already have some records or may be able to get them directly from their adoptive parents, many of my clients are estranged from their parents or have no contact with them—effectively making it impossible to get those records except from a US state or, less likely, from a foreign government. Applying for various vital records involves fees, dealing with records restrictions, and varies widely by state as to whether, for example, a parents’ birth or marriage record is even available by request of an adult child. And yet all of this is required because we are not allowed to know if the record is even present in the immigration file.
Ultimately, what was a fairly straightforward process to apply for a Certificate of Citizenship with documents already in the USCIS file, has now become a quagmire requiring the meticulous collection of documentary evidence of a thirty or forty or fifty year history of a person’s immigration and adoption. It will certainly slow the process and make it more difficult for me and my clients to get what they deserve: the proof and security of US citizenship. It can’t continue like this.
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