The Justice Department has dropped its controversial demand that a liberal advocacy group pay a $373,000 research fee before Justice would respond to its request for information on how often the government has hidden court cases involving post-Sept. 11 immigrant detainees.
But a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge in Washington, D.C., last month that the government would have trouble responding to People for the American Way's Freedom of Information Act request because sealing cases "in their entirety" is "not as rare as it seems."
The government lawyer, Marcia Berman, told U.S. District Judge John D. Bates that "many material witnesses were arrested, and in a lot of those cases they were just detained and never charged," according to a transcript of the March 16 hearing. "But also in a lot of those cases, the government did ask for a proceeding or just an arrest warrant to be sealed."
PFAW has been trying to discover the extent to which the government has sought to hide legal proceedings involving immigrant detainees since Sept. 11. It hopes to publish a report about government secrecy efforts involving hundreds of unidentified detainees.
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