Trump Still Wants to Keep Presidential Records Secret

Presidential records belong to the American people and the White House does not get to decide which of its documents are preserved, hidden, or destroyed — but the Trump administration has been skirting records preservation requirements for years. 

We’re not letting up on fighting back. 

This week, we, along with the American Historical Association (AHA), Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to oppose the administration’s latest attempt to evade its transparency obligations under the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

In April, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel declared that the PRA is unconstitutional and directed White House staff to ignore its provisions, potentially blocking public access to hundreds of millions of records. We, along with the AHA, quickly filed suit to prevent important behind-the-scenes records of Trump’s presidency from potentially being lost to history. We scored a huge victory in May, when the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted our request for an emergency order requiring the president’s advisors and other key White House staff to comply with the PRA.

The Trump administration appealed that ruling using the same argument that the district court already rejected. Our new filing urges the appeals court to reject Trump’s ongoing efforts to avoid transparency and to instead affirm the lower court’s order.

“It’s clear the administration intends to keep pressing this argument as far as it can in pursuit of a power no president has ever had: the ability to arbitrarily decide what will be preserved, what will be disclosed, and what can simply be destroyed,” our Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said.

USAID must end its unlawful FOIA purge policy

Earlier this month, we had a big win when a federal court struck down a Department of Energy policy that could have closed thousands of pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. This week, we cited that court victory in a letter demanding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) abandon its nearly identical policy which requires public records requesters to re-confirm their interest in records that they have already requested.

These “still interested” policies are yet another attempt by the Trump administration to evade its transparency obligations under the law. “The court could not have been clearer: Federal agencies cannot make their FOIA backlogs disappear by putting the burden on requesters to fight back,” our Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said. “Government delay is the government’s problem to fix, not an excuse to deny the public access to records.”

Investigating conditions in immigration detention

In the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, the number of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention skyrocketed. Conditions in immigration detention centers are reportedly horrifying: More than 50 people have died in immigration custody since 2025.

Oversight of these facilities has been an ongoing challenge. We’re fighting to ensure lawmakers can conduct unannounced oversight visits at ICE detention facilities and using public records requests and litigation to investigate mass detention — and we’re seeing results.

Through litigation, over a dozen lawmakers secured a court order that restored Congress’s ability to conduct real-time oversight of immigration detention facilities. We are representing the plaintiffs along with Democracy Forward.

We’ve also obtained Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records that shed light on the impacts of the administration’s expanded immigration enforcement agenda, including contractors’ shift reports, texts from ICE leadership, updates on a chaplain’s program, and official detention policies from the facility in Guantánamo Bay.

This week, we published a summary breaking down what we’ve uncovered and what we still need to learn.

American Oversight in the news

• ICE is asking gate agents to help arrest passengers. Some are pushing back (TIME)
• ICE turns to airport employees for help arresting passengers: ‘I don’t want to be doing this’ (People)
• ICE hasn’t paid UCHealth hospital since last year for immigrant health care (CPR News)
• Maine immigrant detentions outside court, at airport follow national trends (Maine Morning Star)
• Dallas Woodhouse deleted texts subject to records requests, NC auditor’s office says (Raleigh News & Observer)

Other stories we’re following

• Experts raise alarms over Census Bureau report Trump is touting on noncitizen voting (NPR)
• Trump races to prepare for new strains of deadly viruses after cutting biosecurity experts (Washington Post)
• Markwayne Mullin uses Homeland Security to further Trump’s voter fraud crusade (CNN)
• Inside school investigations frozen under Trump: Racial slurs, sexual harassment and more (Washington Post)
• Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 U.S. datasets, endangering public health, education and more (The Guardian)