The identities of federal immigration judges who were the targets of misconduct complaints can remain confidential, a Washington federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a component of the U.S. Department of Justice, in a public-records lawsuit. The immigration office disclosed 16,000 pages associated with 767 complaints in the lawsuit, filed by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) in June 2013. The government released nonconfidential information from substantiated and unsubstantiated complaints. The names of individual judges were redacted. The government argued the public release of the judges’ names and other identifying information would infringe privacy interests. Cooper found the argument persuasive.
“While the public may have some interest in knowing the identities of individual judges, AILA must be content with the voluminous complaint records it has already received,” Cooper wrote last month. “As nonsupervisory, career civil servants, immigration judges retain privacy rights that outweigh the incremental public interest in revealing their identities.
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