DETROIT – A lawsuit has been filed seeking to force ICE to release records about immigrants being held in Michigan jails.
The ACLU of Michigan and the national ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025, to force U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the county jails it contracts with, to release records about detained immigrants held by ICE in local jails -- including Michigan jails.
According to the lawsuit, ICE currently prevents records about immigrants detained in county jails from being made public through an “obscure federal regulation” that says county facilities should not release the records and instead direct the records request directly to ICE. When ICE receives the request through the Freedom of Information Act, ICE does not have those county-created records and therefore has nothing to release.
“Public scrutiny of government conduct is a hallmark of our democracy. This is especially true for jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers, where government officials have almost total control over the daily lives of incarcerated people -- and where they exercise that control behind closed, locked, and guarded doors. ICE has wrongly been misusing an obscure federal regulation to thwart scrutiny by keeping what should be public information secret. The goal of this lawsuit is to put a stop to that illegal and anti-democratic practice,” said Ramis Wadood, staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan.
The ACLU said that while county jails are required under state public records laws to disclose records about what happens in their facilities, ICE repeatedly forbids them from releasing information related to immigrants held under detention contracts with ICE. The county jails are told to deny state-law records requests and redirect those requests to ICE.
Since ICE does not possess most of the requested county-created records, it does not produce them under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The ACLU said these records are “vital to transparency” and include intake, medical, disciplinary, and other records generated by the county jails.
“ICE shouldn’t be pursuing an end run around state transparency laws in an attempt to shield themselves from public scrutiny -- particularly in light of the agency’s long history of abuse. With the Trump administration pursuing a mass deportation and detention agenda, it’s more important now than ever that we know what happens inside ICE detention facilities,” said My Khanh Ngo, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
The ACLU said the goal of the lawsuit is to stop ICE from using the regulation to prevent county jails from disclosing records about detained immigrants that are not in ICE’s possession. The ACLU said without those records immigration service providers cannot adequately assist detained immigrants and organizations like the ACLU cannot shed light on the treatment of immigrants behind bars.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
