 |
|
For six years, a pair of university researchers have been collecting government records to publish an influential analysis of immigration enforcement actions. After the last election, however, things changed.
“It’s pretty much made it at a standstill because they’re holding a good part of the data that we post,” said Susan Long, one of the co-founders of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Courthouse News spoke to Long over the phone Wednesday regarding the federal complaint she and fellow Syracuse professor David Burnham filed on May 9.
Long and Burnham’s data-research center has been producing reports looking into federal staffing, enforcement and spending since its inception in 1987. Starting in 2011, TRAC used the Freedom of Information Act to hunt down a class of records that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to detain immigrants.
ICE agents use Form I-247, more commonly known as the immigration-detainer form, if they need help transferring an immigrant from local to federal law-enforcement custody. The form asks that local police keep the subject of the request up to 48 hours beyond the person’s eligible release date.
Just 10 days shy of the inauguration of President Donald Trump, however, the professors say ICE started withholding “large swaths of data.”
|
|
|
|
