Washington, D.C.— A whistleblower has alleged that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is deliberately rejecting thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from migrants, raising concerns that the agency is manufacturing compliance with a federal court order rather than processing records in good faith.
In a disclosure to Congress, an agency employee said USCIS has imposed arbitrarily strict criteria since 2024, leading to widespread denials of requests for immigration files. The claims come despite USCIS reporting in December that it had reduced its FOIA backlog by 99.96% in just three months, even amid staffing cuts and a government shutdown.
The whistleblower, a disabled Marine veteran with more than a decade of FOIA office experience, argued that the backlog reduction reflects mass closures of requests rather than timely releases of records. Examples cited include:
- Migrants who received documents, that were completely redacted, even though the information was originally given to them.
- FOIA staff instructed that they were not to process requests if applicants had listed their attorney’s address instead of their own.
- Requests were rejected due to minor discrepancies in names, such as including maternal surnames, although the file numbers were identical.
USCIS justified these practices, asserting they were required to comply with privacy laws and to ensure that the records were given to the correct individuals. Agency spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser told that USCIS gets over 2,000 FOIA requests daily, many of which are from applicants with very similar names and birth details. He also stated that job seekers are made aware of the issues and given the opportunity to resubmit their applications.
However, data shows a dramatic rise in refusals, where USCIS closed 5,427 FOIA requests from September through December 2024 because of false information, which is lower than 41,918 in the same period in 2025.
In 2020, the Nightingale vs. USCIS decision ordered the USCIS to abide by the statutory FOIA deadlines and reduce the FOIA backlog of immigration documents.
Although President Donald Trump’s administration is known for immigration enforcement, the whistleblower insisted that FOIA-related problems at USCIS existed before the current administration.