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October 2024
Greetings. This installment of Immigration Disclosures highlights a video the American Immigration Council published breaking down key questions regarding birthright citizenship; the transparency team’s discussion on FOIA at AILA’s Ohio Chapter Conference; and an advocacy letter on USCIS’ search and remand policy regarding noncitizen A-Files.
Initial Disclosures:
* Anti-immigrant political factions have repeatedly attempted to restrict birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. However, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and decades of Supreme Court precedent have maintained that anyone born on U.S. territory is a citizen by birth. The Council published a video breaking down key questions regarding birthright citizenship. Watch the video here [[link removed]] and read our fact sheet here [[link removed]] .
* The Council’s transparency team discussed the Council’s work and how FOIA can best be used by immigration attorneys at AILA’s Ohio Chapter Conference.
The Council Sends Letter to USCIS to Improve the Agency’s Search and Remand Practices
An Alien File (A-File) acts as an individual's official immigration history record. Before the digital age, it was a paper file [[link removed]] of a person’s immigration applications, petitions, and requests, as well as enforcement transactions. Now, an A-File can be a paper file, an electronic file, or sometimes both, and it collects records from various systems belonging to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Regardless of format, the A-File plays a crucial role in the immigration process: immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) use the A-File in immigration proceedings and USCIS reviews the file when processing an application for immigration benefits.
The only way noncitizens can obtain their A-File is through a FOIA request to USCIS. USCIS policy [[link removed]] requires it to search two systems for immigration records before it makes a “no records” determination: (1) Person Centric Identity Service (PCIS); and (2) Person Centric Query Service (PCQS) [[link removed]] . These two distinct systems search different sets of data using different search terms. PCIS uses artificial intelligence to match and aggregate biometric, biographic, and immigration data and corresponding transactional records for an individual ingested from a subset of USCIS systems. It does not pull data from all USCIS systems or other systems used by CBP, ICE, the Department of State, and immigration courts. PCQS, by contrast, searches all these systems directly in a single query but returns a list of data and records rather than the person-centric profile that PCIS provides.
Currently, immigration practitioners across the country are reporting difficulty and delay in obtaining their clients’ A-Files and other immigration records through FOIA. USCIS has increasingly been making no records determinations on FOIA request for these records after searching only the PCIS. When practitioners appeal these determinations, USCIS remands the requests for additional searches but then does not perform those searches or make new determinations on the request within the 20 business days provided by FOIA for doing so. These search and remand practices violate FOIA’s requirements to (a) search all locations likely to contain responsive records before making a no records determination, and (b) make a timely new determination on remand.
The Council sent the USCIS Ombudsman and FOIA Liaison a letter requesting the agency to inspect these unlawful search and remand practices and provide a proposal for ending them within the next few months. The call for FOIA requests that USCIS has processed in this manner is ongoing. Please report any such request using this form [[link removed]] .
Why does this matter?
* USCIS’ unlawful practices are impeding immigration practitioners’ representation of noncitizens seeking an immigration benefit or fighting removal.
Read more: Torrance County Detention Facility: Troubling Role in Detaining Haitian Migrants During the 2021 Del Rio Incident [[link removed]]
The American Immigration Council works to hold the
government accountable on immigration issues. We harness freedom of information requests, litigation, and advocacy to expose the wrongdoing and promote transparency within immigration agencies. Make a donation today. [[link removed]]
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