Close to thirty immigration attorneys told The New York Times that federal agencies are blacking out or withholding the paperwork their clients need to prove they are legally allowed to remain in the United States, and in some cases officials claim records simply do not exist even when lawyers know otherwise. This is a request people file by the hundreds of thousands each year, and the gap between a complete file and a blacked-out page can decide whether someone stays in the country or gets deported.
- A former senior USCIS records official, later identified as Timothy Turner, told Congress the agency ordered staff in May 2025 to withhold tax returns, court transcripts, joint bank records, marriage certificates and any document not written in English.
- Attorney Gregory Luce's own case data shows more than 80 percent of his adoptee clients' files came back redacted or withheld after April 17, 2025, up from a 10 percent average the twelve months before that date.
- A 2020 federal court order in Nightingale v. USCIS gives the agency 20 to 30 business days to answer records requests, yet a leaked internal email described a way to close cases and count them as resolved without ever producing the files.
- Cipriano Alarcon-Galvez, 54, faces a deportation hearing in December while USCIS tells him his appeal will not be decided until May 2027.
The Only Door, and It Is Barely Open
Unlike a defendant in criminal court, an immigrant facing removal has no automatic right to see the case file the government is building against them. Their sole formal path runs through a records request filed under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking what officials call an A-File, the folder that can hold everything from decades-old visa paperwork to an officer's own notes from an interview. Years of delays in answering those requests pushed a group of attorneys to sue, and that December, a judge on a federal court in California sided with them in Nightingale v. USCIS, ordering the agency to respond within 20 business days, 30 under some circumstances, and to update the court on its progress every quarter.
A Compliance Report That Does Not Add Up
USCIS told the court in a December 2025 filing that it had all but wiped out its backlog of A-File requests, a cut of 99.96 percent that took the pending caseload from thousands down to two, according to the whistleblower group Government Accountability Project, which represented the employee who came forward. The organization says leadership at the agency's National Records Center quietly rewrote the rejection rules the day after an earlier compliance filing, so staff could close a case, and log it as resolved, over something as small as a birthdate entered day-first instead of month-first, or an attorney's mailing address listed instead of the client's own. An internal email the group obtained put it plainly: staff had found "a way to close 99% of FOIA requests as failure to comply." The pattern shows up in the agency's own figures: USCIS closed 41,918 requests over inaccurate or incorrect information between mid-September and mid-December of 2025, compared with 5,427 in that same window of 2024, nearly eight times as many.
None of this began under the current administration. The earliest change described in the whistleblower's disclosure dates back to March 2024, months before President Trump's second term started, when FOIA officers were instructed to tell Cuban nationals seeking entry records that none existed, even though the agency likely had them on file, according to the American Immigration Council, which has represented plaintiffs in the case since 2019. What shifted afterward, lawyers and the whistleblower say, was scale: officials also began stripping identifying details from Form I-213, the document that records how an immigration officer describes an arrest, even when the material being cut came from the immigrant's own paperwork.
One Family's 33-Year-Old Paper Trail
In February, Cipriano Alarcon-Galvez went to citizenship officials seeking a copy of the green-card petition his mother, who had since become a naturalized citizen, filed on his behalf back in 1993. That decades-old document could open the door to permanent residency and to amnesty, since he entered the country as a child without authorization. More than half of what came back was blacked out entirely, and a separate request his mother filed turned up copies of the same petitions with every detail about her children stripped away. A records officer confirmed by email that the petition exists, then told his lawyer to try the State Department instead. Alarcon-Galvez, a father of four U.S.-citizen daughters who has spent decades in Oceanside, California, is now due in deportation court in December, and the agency says it will not rule on his appeal before May 2027. "It's almost like a joke," said his attorney, Caroline Matthews, who argues her client's claim to the paperwork rests on solid constitutional ground.
Adoptees Caught in the Same Net
Gregory Luce built his practice around helping international adoptees prove they are already Americans, largely by pulling old records through FOIA. Around April 2025, he says, those requests began coming back gutted or empty, pushing him toward alternate ways of tracking down proof that often ended in dead ends. His own tally of the agency's replies to his clients found redactions or denials across more than 80 percent of the paperwork in the year that followed April 17, against a 10 percent average in the twelve months before it. By July he had taken the government to court on behalf of roughly two dozen adoptees still waiting on their records.
What Washington Is Saying
The Justice Department declined to comment, and White House officials likewise sidestepped detailed questions about the redacted files, though spokesperson Lauren Bis said every immigrant in the country illegally still receives full due process. The Department of Homeland Security said its records staff respond promptly and explain why a request comes back empty, and USCIS noted it fields more than 2,000 FOIA requests daily, many from people who share similar names and birthdates, which the agency says forces careful identity checks before any file goes out. Andrew R. Arthur spent years on the immigration bench before joining the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter enforcement; he granted that the system has real flaws but defended the underlying policy as a privacy safeguard, noting that immigrants can sue over wrongful denials and recover legal costs if they win.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, countered that the new rejection criteria erode transparency at the exact moment immigrants most need their files to push back against the government's own account of their cases. For attorneys like Patricia M. Corrales, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer and former ICE prosecutor, the practice has a simpler explanation. The agency's approach, she said, "is to hide the ball," and without a strong lawyer on the other end, she added, the immigrants who cannot get their own paperwork are the ones who end up deported.
