Maribel Xirum, Javier Jaimes Jaimes, and Baijebo Toe v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, Todd M. Lyons, Monica S. Burke, Ricardo A. Wong, Travis Graham, Angelina Ramos, Virginia Sutter, Jennifer M. Flater, and Mike Melendez

Summary

The United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana denied plaintiffs’ request to compel inclusion of the Davidson Memorandum in the administrative record for their claims concerning ICE payments to and oversight of Clay County. The court held that plaintiffs had not presented non-speculative evidence that ICE directly or indirectly considered the memorandum when making the challenged decisions, despite its citation in the Homan Memorandum. The court ordered defendants to serve an amended administrative record including the Homan Memorandum and set deadlines for proposing a briefing schedule on anticipated cross-motions for summary judgment.

Holdings

1. No. Relevance to the claims and citation in another document do not, without more, establish that the agency directly or indirectly considered the document when making the challenged decisions.
2. Plaintiffs did not overcome the strong presumption of regularity because they identified no non-speculative, concrete evidence that the Davidson Memorandum was directly or indirectly considered by the actual agency decision makers.
3. No. Because the Davidson Memorandum was not part of the administrative record on non-privilege grounds, the court did not reach Defendants' privilege arguments.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the Davidson Memorandum should be added to the administrative record because it was cited in the Homan Memorandum.
2. Whether the Davidson Memorandum's relevance to Plaintiffs' APA claims was sufficient to overcome the presumption that the agency's certified administrative record was complete.
3. Whether the court needed to decide Defendants' attorney-client and deliberative-process privilege arguments concerning the Davidson Memorandum.

Disposition

other