This means that countless requesters – including reporters, scholars, and those subject to immigration actions – are not getting the information they need to check against unlawful actions and to better hold the government accountable to the governed.

Little improvement has occurred in USCIS's processing of FOIA requests. While the number of FOIA requests the agency receives has been increasing, during the last quarter of FY 2016 the number of closed FOIA cases took a precipitous tumble, falling from a monthly average of 13,913 in June 2016 to only 211 during October 2016. Closures have only recovered slightly to just 1,400 during December 2016.

These figures are based upon an independent analysis of request-by-request data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in response to the quarterly survey conducted by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University for the FOIA Project.

The latest figures on FOIA backlogs and wait times for federal agencies responding to TRAC's latest quarterly survey are now posted on FOIAproject.org.

http://foiaproject.org/2017/05/08/uscis-backlog-skyrockets/

Our "Agency FOIA Backlogs and Processing Times" data tool shows these trends in detail.

http://foiaproject.org/request-chart/#dhs-uscis

If you want to be sure to receive notification whenever new information becomes available, follow us on Twitter @foiaproject or sign up for TRAC's email list to receive notification of newly issued reports:

http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

The FOIA Project is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants and individual contributions. The TRAC Gift Fund has been set up through the Newhouse School at Syracuse University to support this effort:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl