Have you made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)? Our Compliance Team wants to hear about your experience.
Our compliance review process includes several methods to better understand how an agency FOIA program operates and what kind of challenges or opportunities it faces. In addition to interviewing the FOIA program’s management and surveying the program’s FOIA staff, we also review the requests we have received to mediate FOIA disputes with the agency, review data from Annual FOIA Reports and FOIA litigation against the agency to identify trends, and review a statistically significant sample of the agency’s FOIA case files from the previous fiscal year. We analyze the information to evaluate the agency’s compliance with the statute, highlight best practices, and make recommendations to improve the FOIA program (you can see all of our published assessments and recommendations here). We decided to expand our reach to FOIA requesters as part of our compliance review process because we started hearing from requesters after our assessments were complete.
As the Federal FOIA Ombudsman, we have always believed good customer service is a critical component of a successful FOIA program. In order to better understand the kind of customer service the agency provides, we think it is important to hear from the agency’s customers. If you have filed a FOIA request with ICE and would like to tell us about your experience, please email ogis@nara.gov.
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