Over the past decade, the United States government has dramatically expanded its use of a program called “stipulated removal” that has allowed immigration officials to deport over 160,000 non-U.S. citizens without ever giving them their day in court. Stanford Law School Immigrants’ Rights Clinic (Stanford IRC) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), on behalf of clients NILC, National Lawyers Guild-San Francisco, and the ACLU of Southern California, sued to get more information about this program under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Prior to the lawsuit, the stipulated removal program had operated largely outside the public eye. After extensive negotiation, Stanford IRC and its clients/co-counsel were able to obtain thousands of pages of documents, links to which are provided below. Attorneys and law professors at Western State University College of Law, Stanford IRC, and NILC have also written a report synthesizing information obtained from the never-before-released U.S. government documents and data about stipulated removal. Many of these government records reveal that the stipulated removal program has been implemented across the U.S. in a way that is likely to infringe immigrants’ due process rights.
Links to the documents obtained through the FOIA lawsuit are provided below.