Block Club Chicago v. Department of Homeland Security

In the first 10 days of the second Trump administration, Chicago was “ground zero” for a massive ICE operation that arrested hundreds of people. They were dubbed “the worst of the worst” by ICE, but the agency only released names and criminal histories of those they chose to publicize, keeping the others secret.

A media outlet called Block Club Chicago filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the names and other details about the people who had been arrested. The Department of Homeland Security (of which ICE is a part) denied the request. Block Club filed a lawsuit here in D.C., but the district court accepted ICE’s argument that the arrestees’ privacy interests in remaining unknown were stronger than the public’s right to know who ICE had seized and detained.

Block Club appealed, and on October 5, 2026, we filed an amicus brief showing that secret arrests are a tool of authoritarian government, and are anathema in a free country, as explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 84 and as confirmed by 250 years of U.S. history in which “police blotter” information has always been a public record.

Oral argument in the court of appeals has not yet been scheduled.