Tag Archives: ICE

[August 9, 2018 update] Thank you Meg Phillips, NARA’s External Affairs Liaison, for contacting me and offering additional information and context. Meg notes that “No agency may dispose of records without written authorization from the Archivist of the United States in the form of approval of the records retention schedule. That is what is going on with ICE – ICE submitted a schedule, NARA requested public comment, which it has gotten, and NARA is now working with ICE to revise the schedule.”

Because of the public interest in the ICE schedule, Archivist David Ferriero recently blogged about where NARA’s process is at, and also wrote a response to the AHA letter dated August 1, 2018 (available as a PDF).

For those interested, the ALA Washington Office published a good series last year on how the records scheduling process works — part 1 and part 2.

Good on the American Historical Association for writing a letter to Archivist of the US David Ferriero to complain about the imminent destruction of records by the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Most people do not realize that executive branch agencies get to define what constitutes a “record” and its own records schedule of what ultimately gets sent to the National Archives for preservation. NARA only offers guidance to executive agencies, they do not tell executive agencies what to preserve.

U.S. historians are rallying to stop federal immigration agencies from destroying records of their treatment towards immigrants.

In a letter addressed to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain their records, the American Historical Association has demanded that the regulatory body shut down any “threats to the preservation of records relating to the treatment of immigrants by the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”

The letter, signed by AHA Executive Director James Grossman, comes after it was revealed that ICE had sought permission from NARA to begin destroying years’ worth of data, including information on reports of sexual abuse, solitary confinement and in-custody deaths. 

via U.S. Historians Are Fighting to Stop ICE From Erasing Records of Agency’s Treatment of Immigrants.