A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has handed a major victory to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, ruling that the agency’s massive backlog of immigration and travel records requests is the result of an unprecedented deluge of filings rather than an unlawful policy of intentional delay.
U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell granted summary judgment in favor of the federal government, dismissing a high-profile lawsuit that sought to force sweeping changes at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The decision also shut down the plaintiffs’ bid for class certification and denied their requests for additional discovery.
The lawsuit, Sanchez Mora v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was launched by three immigration attorneys and three individuals who argued that CBP maintains a systemic practice of ignoring the mandatory timelines set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Under federal law, agencies are generally required to determine whether they will comply with a records request within 20 business days.
The plaintiffs sought to represent a nationwide class of thousands of individuals whose CBP records requests had been stranded in the agency’s pipeline for more than 30 business days without a formal determination. They asked the court to issue a permanent injunction requiring the government to clear the backlogged individual requests within 60 days.
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The individual plaintiffs—Ali Ainab, Rafael Edgardo Flores Rodriguez, and Beatriz Ariadna Garcia Mixcoa—detailed how the long wait times actively disrupted their lives. Ainab needed exit and entry records to prove his children’s U.S. citizenship to an overseas embassy.
Rodriguez required proof of legal entry to pursue a green card, and Mixcoa’s asylum documentation was stalled due to the delays. The three named immigration attorneys—Julian Sanchez Mora, Siobhan Marie Waldron, and Carlos Moctezuma Garcia—testified that CBP regularly takes 10 to 12 months to process basic requests, severely hindering their ability to defend clients in deportation proceedings or meet strict statutory filing deadlines for asylum.
While the government did not dispute that it routinely blows past the 20-day statutory window, it argued that the delays are a direct consequence of an operational crisis, not a deliberate policy. Agency declarations submitted by the government revealed that CBP’s open FOIA cases climbed to 123,018, with 107,521 of those classified as backlogged.
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The surge is tied directly to a massive increase in incoming paperwork. In fiscal year 2016, CBP received 66,690 FOIA requests. By fiscal year 2025, that number skyrocketed to 207,396—a threefold increase driven by automated online submission portals and an expanding universe of digital communication records.
In her memorandum opinion, Judge Howell ruled that these sharp, year-over-year spikes in submissions went far beyond a “predictable agency workload.” Instead, she found they constituted “exceptional circumstances” under federal law, which legally justifies the processing delays.
The court also found that the government demonstrated sufficient “due diligence” in trying to manage the crisis. The decision highlighted several stop-gap measures implemented by CBP and DHS, including:
- Reaching an agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to handle certain overlapping record consultations directly.
- Implementing a multi-track processing system to separate simple individual record requests from complex media queries.
- Approving staff overtime and utilizing light-duty and temporary assignments to process files.
- Deploying seven automated “bots” to cut down on manual transactions, alongside updating the online portal to ensure cleaner submissions from the public.
The plaintiffs attempted to counter these claims by pointing to public agency reports showing that CBP’s backlog jumped by over 400 percent between fiscal years 2023 and 2024, while new requests only grew by roughly 23 percent over that exact period. They argued this discrepancy pointed to structural mismanagement or a policy of treating deadlines as optional.
Judge Howell rejected that interpretation, noting that backlogs are cumulative. She observed that the same data showed CBP actually increased its total processed requests by more than 65 percent in 2024 compared to the previous year, which supported the government’s position that it was working diligently to address the volume.
The court similarly denied the plaintiffs’ motion to open up the case to standard civil discovery. Judge Howell reiterated established D.C. Circuit precedent holding that discovery in FOIA litigation is an exceptional remedy reserved for instances where there is clear evidence that an agency acted in bad faith. The plaintiffs’ claims, she concluded, did not overcome the legal presumption of good faith afforded to the government’s detailed operational declarations.
“The fact that individuals facing immigration proceedings can only obtain their own CBP records through the protracted FOIA process is concerning,” Judge Howell wrote, acknowledging the high stakes for the applicants. However, she concluded that the structural lack of standard discovery mechanisms in immigration court is a policy problem for Congress to resolve, rather than a matter for the judiciary to fix via FOIA litigation.
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