Judge denies Berkeley law professor’s request to compel ICE data

(CN) — A federal judge in San Francisco sided with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a dispute brought by a UC Berkeley law professor seeking detention and deportation data from the agency.

Professor David Hausman initially submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to ICE, seeking 14 years of enforcement data on an expedited basis. After the agency denied the request, Hausman sued and filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, seeking to compel the court to order the agency to fulfill his request within eight days.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin denied the motion, citing an apparent lack of imminent, irreparable harm that Hausman would face without injunctive relief. Courts considering preliminary injunctions in the FOIA context must focus their attention on the timing of the information and whether or not it may become stale, she wrote.

“Here, Hausman argues that the requested records are necessary to inform public debate regarding rapidly changing immigration enforcement policy,” the Biden appointee wrote. “At this stage and on this record, the value of some recent portion of the information sought can hardly be overstated.”

Hausman, who runs the Deportation Data Project with his colleagues, sought spreadsheets that report on patterns in ICE enforcement actions, court records show. They include anonymized records that show arrests, detentions and removals, among other things, that can help researchers trace the outcomes as each person moves through the system.

Hausman and his colleagues originally sought the records last September.

“The spreadsheets thus promote public scrutiny of government conduct, ensuring greater accountability and revealing violations of law, including constitutional violations, during a period of significant public discussion regarding ICE,” the judge wrote. “Indeed, the information from the spreadsheets has been used to show ICE’s violations of its own rules governing the use of holding facilities for only short-term detention — leading courts and local governments to take action against unlawful uses of such facilities.”

However, Martinez-Olguin declined to grant Hausman’s motion to compel the records under a preliminary injunction.

“Though the spreadsheets may aid in the identification of constitutional violations or other forms of harm, ICE’s failure to provide the data does not itself represent irreparable harm in the absence of an imminent event that would vitiate the value of the data,” the judge wrote. “Moreover, Hausman cannot claim that imminent harm would result if his requested preliminary injunction does not issue given the scope of his requested relief. Hausman does not demonstrate that he would suffer imminent harm if his demand for over 14 years of historical data is not met on an urgent basis.”

Hausman did not identify a definite impending or time-limited event after which the value of the spreadsheet data would decrease, she continued.

Although Hausman argued the data would turn stale if it was not expedited, he did not claim an injury other than his desire to contribute to the national discourse around immigration and failed to show how the yearslong scope of his request would lose its value, Martinez-Olguin concluded.

In a statement to Courthouse News, Hausman vowed to continue his efforts to seek the release of deportation data.

“ICE owes the public timely information about its arrests, detentions and deportations,” he wrote. “The Deportation Data Project has obtained and posted this information six times since 2025, and each time we have posted the data for free at deportationdata.org. We will continue to seek regular updates to this information.”

The Deportation Data Project is a research initiative that analyzes and publishes ICE data primarily through FOIA requests in an effort to make deportation records more accessible to the public.

Neither ICE nor the DOJ immediately responded to requests for comment.