By: Derek Hawkins//September 8, 2015//
Civil
7th Circuit Court of Appeals
Officials: BAUER and SYKES, Circuit Judges, and REAGAN, Chief District Judge
Freedom of Information Act
No. 14-3733 David Rubman v. USCIS
Disclosure of a single document when numerous documents requested in relation to H1-B visa was inadequate to satisfy request.
“It’s possible that Rubman’s request was too “non-specific and unwieldy” to permit an effective search, as the district judge thought, though we note that CIS has never specifically lodged that objection, and the search was restricted to a four-year period. But if so, that’s the exact situation addressed by 6 C.F.R. § 5.3(b): If Rubman’s request did not “reasonably describe records,” CIS was required to “give [him] an opportunity to discuss [his] request” and clarify it. We have no doubt that CIS believed in good faith that it was being helpful and efficient by generating a summary data table in response to Rubman’s FOIA request. We certainly don’t want to discourage agencies from providing raw data, database query results, or newly generated charts and tables when a FOIA request asks for them, when there are no other responsive records available, or when a requester consents to one of those formats. But when Rubman asked for “all documents reflecting statistics” and then objected to CIS’s decision to respond with a newly generated summary table, the agency was required to sea”
Reversed and Remanded