Identities of Immigration Judges Shielded in FOIA Litigation: AILA v. EOIR

"The conduct of the nation’s immigration judges has been the focus of considerable public concern in recent years.  Seeking to shed additional light on this important issue, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (“AILA”) filed a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request with the Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”) — the component of the Department of Justice that supervises immigration judges — for records related to complaints against individual judges and EOIR’s final written resolutions of those complaints.  After AILA filed this lawsuit, EOIR produced some 16,000 pages of records associated with 767 complaints but redacted or withheld the individual judges’ personal information — including their names, genders, and work locations.  Both parties now move for summary judgment.  AILA insists that EOIR must disclose the identity of individual judges, as well as other material that EOIR redacted from the produced records as non-responsive, and publish its complaint resolutions.  EOIR retorts that identifying the immigration judges by name would unduly infringe their privacy interests and that its other redactions were proper.  It further argues that FOIA does not require release of the complaint resolutions.

While the public may have some interest in knowing the identities of individual judges, AILA must be content with the voluminous complaint records it has already received.  As non-supervisory, career civil servants, immigration judges retain privacy rights that outweigh the incremental public interest in revealing their identities.  The Court therefore will grant EOIR’s summary judgment motion as it relates to the redaction of the judges’ personal identifying information.  The Court also will grant summary judgment for EOIR with respect to AILA’s request for the complaint resolutions because the resolutions are not the result of an adversarial process and do not carry the force of law.  The Court will grant summary judgment for AILA, however, with respect to EOIR’s redaction of other information in the complaint files." - AILA v. EOIR, Dec. 24, 2014.