We Asked for ICE Bodycam Footage. DHS Claims They Don’t Have It. |
The Department of Homeland Security claimed four times within 48 hours that it had “no documents” in response to records requests from the Freedom of the Press Foundation late last year. These brush-offs raise serious questions about whether the agency is saving its documents anymore, much less creating them in the first place.
Each of our Freedom of Information Act requests was for records likely to exist, and any single “no records” response would have been suspicious. But four in rapid succession is enough to cast doubt on Homeland Security’s record-keeping practices and its compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.
These are the records we asked for and DHS claims it simply doesn’t have.
All emails sent or received by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem containing the terms “CNN” and “ICEBlock”
DHS responded on December 11 it couldn’t find any records about this attempt to intimidate the press from reporting on ICE. This dubious claim came even though Noem said publicly this summer that she was in communication with Attorney General Pam Bondi about prosecuting CNN for reporting on ICEBlock, a crowdsourced application that tracks ICE sightings.
It’s a little hard to see how Noem could have worked with Bondi on potential legal action against both entities without mentioning them by name. It’s similarly difficult to imagine that nobody else within DHS, including its Office of General Counsel, emailed Noem to advise or ask questions on the potential prosecution.
One explanation is that Noem’s summer claim was just bluster. Another is that the DHS search wasn’t as thorough as the agency claimed. Yet another possibility is that these discussions happened over third-party applications, like Signal, and were never forwarded to official accounts.
Many agencies’ records management rules do allow for the use of third-party platforms, but Biden-era guidance from the National Archives and Records Administration requires these messages be forwarded to official accounts within 20 days.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as acting head of the National Archives after President Donald Trump