Dude, where’s my FOIA?

We’ve heard from numerous people over the years who have requested the files about their travel being kept by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or made other Freedom of Information Act requests to DHS component agencies, but who have never gotten any response.
In response to a lawsuit we brought, DHS and CBP claimed that they had no record at all of one of our FOIA and Privacy Act appeals, and no record of the existence of the person who had signed the receipt for our certified letter.
And we’ve seen letters sent in response to FOIA requests made years previously, asking requesters to confirm that they still wanted the information they had requested – as though government agencies could presume that theIr own delays had caused requesters to lose interest or abandon their requests.
Unfortunately, we aren’t alone: These turn out to be standard FOIA operating procedures for the DHS and other agencies.
A recent joint letter from more than a dozen organizations that work to promote government transparency points out that it is illegal to ‘close’ a FOIA request because of the passage of time (i.e. the agency’s own delay in responding) or because a requester doesn’t ‘reconfirm’ that they want they records they requested. The signers of the letter report that:

This post was published at Papers Please on December 4, 2014.