Sunshine: Weak
Appreciating the Unified Consensus That Government By Secrecy Can Only Be Tyranny
March 17, 2026
Top o’ the evening to ya!
It’s Sunshine Week. But the nation’s largest domestic law enforcement agencies claim their sunshine offices are closed. Defunded. The WH ever so graciously promised to obey some specific laws and not deport citizens.
Against Secrecy
Transparency has gotten markedly worse in the past year. The backlogs have grown, and the responses have grown more absurd. DHS FOIA agencies are front-desking FOIA requests with silly new requirements that aren’t in the statute, the regs, or any published policy (violating 5 USC 552(a)(1)&(2), aiming to administratively close requests and avoid appeals and litigation. Requestors who aren’t accustomed to these practices are being delayed and dissuaded from perfecting their requests and securing their legal rights to prompt access to agency records.
We know less about what our government’s up to than we did this time last year. Even before successive shutdowns, agency responses slowed to a crawl before coming to a nearly imperceptible halt. Requests that took 3 months a year ago are now stale by 12. Long-backlogged appeals are ignored, tempting litigation and the costs it brings. The pattern has built to a crescendo, trumpeted broadly by Nate Jones in a great piece for The Washington Post about what FOIA agencies are telling courts about their delays. The piece answers the question about intent definitively through aggregation. Yes: Cuts to the federal workforce rendered FOIA offices across the government severely hobbled in their capacity to fulfill their legally mandated duties. No: The additional monies flowing in from OB3 haven’t trickled down to the transparency offices.
Not even the annual FOIA reports—whose timing I imagine helped inform the organizers of Sunshine Week—are on time.
USCIS Litigation Guidance
And in honor of it, as a special for all you tired and beleaguered immigration litigators out there with cases against USCIS, I’ve got a special pot o’ gold at the end of this FOIA rainbow:
Here’s 293 pages of internal litigation guidance from USCIS.
Here’s 205 pages of internal slide decks about USCIS litigation dating back to 2020.
Great New Detention Deaths Map Tool
Here’s a wonderful tool from Austin and Adam:
Indy Journalism Follow of the Week
Here’s a byline you should follow.
I love this!:
"It is no excuse — and it will be no excuse — for the agencies to assert that they are now unable to respond to Plaintiff’s requests or proposals because they are understaffed. … The Court expects them to comply with their obligations under FOIA and the Court’s orders, and that they may not evade those obligations by dismissing the FOIA staff needed to do so.”