My Front-Row Seat to the Slow Death of the Freedom of Information Act

I file FOIA requests for a living, and the landmark law—which turns 60 this week—is near a breaking point.

In January 2025, I received a response to a Freedom of Information Act request I’d sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December—of 2020, four years earlier. The law plainly states that federal agencies have 20 business days to provide a substantive response to all FOIA requests. But ICE didn’t care.

“Before we begin the time-consuming review process,” the email stated, using the same boilerplate language I’d been given by the agency in response to other, unrelated FOIA requests, “we want to ensure that you are still interested in continuing the processing of this request.”

This Saturday is not just the 250th anniversary of the United States. It’s also the sixtieth anniversary of FOIA, one of the most critical tools for government transparency in the U.S., which has been used to uncover severe government wrongdoing. Alas, the law—or rather, the government’s adherence to it—is broken.

Over the past 15 years, in my work at the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, I’ve filed and helped to litigate dozens of FOIA requests, primarily related to federal law enforcement programs run by our bureaucracy of acronyms—ICE, FBI, DHS, DOD, and many more. It has become increasingly apparent that most federal agencies don’t take these inquiries seriously unless, and until, we take them to court. This is not how it’s supposed to work.

While the Trump administration’s mass purging of federal employees and offices has created new roadblocks to filing records requests, government resistance to the law is not new. In fact, President Lyndon B. Johnson........

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