“The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) October 4, 2010 charged the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency of serious legal and procedural violations in its withholding of performance data about how the agency is enforcing the immigration laws. The deficiencies, detailed in a letter TRAC sent the agency {October 4, 2010], involve ICE’s violation of long standing provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the agency’s own administrative rules and the stated policies of Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama in the handling of a request from TRAC for anonymous alien-by-alien statistical data about the arrests, detentions, charges and removal activities of the agency. The agency’s actions — spelled out in a three-page September 22 letter to TRAC — have the effect of denying the American people concrete information about an important and controversial aspect of a key responsibility of the federal government: what is it doing and not doing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Among the anonymous statistical data that ICE previously released but now said were “unavailable” were the city or state where the alien’s apprehension took place, the facility where the alien is currently being detained, the nature of the formal removal charges, the details of any criminal charges and the alien’s marital status. Under the FOIA, all federal agencies are required to provide specific reasons — such as national security or privacy — when they withhold records from requestors. But in the September 22 letter, FOIA Director Catrina M. Pavlik-Kennan, did not cite any of the possible exemptions to justify her decision not to provide a large segment of the data requested in May by TRAC.”