WMRA has been denied detailed ICE arrest records following a nearly nine-month battle over a Freedom of Information Act request. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Last October, WMRA aired a report about the number of ICE arrests conducted within our broadcast region in the first three months of the second Trump administration – 139 people. Many more were arrested in the cities of North Chesterfield and Chantilly, where two ICE offices are located. We also shared information about the number and severity of those people's criminal convictions, or lack thereof.
We got that information as the result of a FOIA request submitted last March, in an extensive spreadsheet called "Enforcement and Removal Operation Administrative Arrest Requested Statistics." By the time we got those records, the information was already six months old, so we immediately submitted a new FOIA request for the same spreadsheet with those same data points through October 1, 2025, or the end of the fiscal year.
After several emails back and forth, our request was ultimately denied in May, as the ICE FOIA office claimed "these documents are on the ICE website."
We immediately appealed this decision, because neither this spreadsheet nor these data points are on the website. The data shown on their website are only current to December 31, 2024 – the end of the presidency of Joe Biden. There is no spreadsheet with the title we requested. Nowhere on the page's dashboards or linked material are there the details contained within the spreadsheet we requested, including the city where the arrest took place and the criminal convictions of each arrestee.
We appealed the agency's FOIA decision, and the appeal was denied on June 25. Their response claimed that their decision to refer us to the website "was adequate in all respects."
They go on to say that FOIA "'imposes no duty on the agency to create records,' and 'an agency is not required by FOIA to create a document that does not exist in order to satisfy a request.'"
We reached out to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press to get their take on this. Rachel Seller, a legal fellow for the organization, wrote back, "unfortunately, I'm not sure it's possible to draw any real conclusions from their response. ICE may not maintain the spreadsheet anymore, but if that's the case, I don't know why they didn't just say that instead of insisting that the website has the data."
