Emuwa v. DHS (D.C. Cir.) — affirming district court decision holding the disclosure of USCIS officers’ written asylum recommendations, which are indisputably protected by the deliberative-process privilege under the Circuit’s decision in Abtew v. DHS, 808 F.3d 895 (D.C. Cir. 2015), would also “foreseeably harm interests” protected by Exemption 5; noting the agency’s declarant demonstrated how disclosure would lead to “reduced candor by line asylum officers,” especially considering other “contextual” factors like the “‘sensitive’ nature of asylum adjudications and the specific concern about facilitating asylum fraud”; of special note, rejecting the requester’s arguments that prior release of asylum recommendations by DHS’s predecessor agency, INS, in past decades foreclosed satisfaction of the foreseeable harm standard in present instances.

Hall & Assocs. v. EPA (D.D.C.) — granting in part and denying in part plaintiff’s fee motion in a case concerning a FOIA request filed in November 2014; awarding $132,531.51 for attorneys’ fees according to the USAO Matrix, and another $18,566.81 for out-of-pocket costs; noting the “fee award represents a significant reduction of the seven-figure award” ($1,514,056.66) sought by the request, but that partial recovery was warranted, notwithstanding insufficient evidence to demonstrate the requester’s proposed market rates or work-hours expended on the lawsuit, because (1) there is no dispute the requester substantially prevailed, (2) the request at issue “had at least some public value in its potential to uncover useful information regarding the management of essential local government services,” and (3) the EPA’s grounds for withholding, which “helped prolong this litigation,” were “not entirely reasonable.”

Ball v. EOUSA (D.D.C.) — ruling that: (1) EOUSA performed adequate search for records concerning plaintiff’s prosecution for child sexual offenses and noting that EOUSA’s consultation with ICE did not obligate ICE to conduct a search of its own records; (2) EOUSA properly withheld records pursuant to Exemption 3 in conjunction with the Child Victims’ and Child Witnesses’ Rights Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3509(d)(1); (3) EOUSA improperly relied on Exemption 5’s attorney work-privilege to withhold “trial preparation material” that consisted entirely of “publicly available documents created by a third party,” which the court could not “fathom” being exempt; (4) EOUSA improperly relied on the deliberative process privilege, as well as Exemptions 6 and 7(C), to withhold a copy of an Eleventh Circuit decision involving a sex offender, remarking that it “beggars belief to assert privacy interests in a published court opinion”; EOUSA was entitled under Exemption 5 to withhold “highlighted annotations” appearing on a few publicly available pages; (5) EOUSA properly invoked the attorney work-product privilege to withhold “internal memoranda and emails” generated in anticipation prosecuting plaintiff, except for one redacted email that was previously released in unredacted form and another that EOUSA failed to defend; (6) EOUSA sufficiently demonstrated foreseeable harm for all the Exemption 5 withholdings on which it prevailed; (7) EOUSA properly withheld certain records pursuant to Exemptions 6 and 7(E).

Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2024 are available here. Earlier opinions are available here.