Lawyers: U.S. Redacting Documents Immigrants Need to Prove Legal Status

In courtrooms across the United States, a quiet but consequential struggle is unfolding: noncitizens facing deportation are being denied access to the very government records that document their own legal presence in the country. The Freedom of Information Act was conceived as a safeguard against the opacity of power, yet immigration lawyers report that the law is being met with blackened pages, missing files, and bureaucratic silence. When a government holds both the evidence of a person's lawful status and the authority to remove them, the question of who controls the record becomes a questi