Rubman v. U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services

Dist. Ct. erred in granting defendant’s motion for summary judgment in action under Freedom of Information Act seeking copies of all documents reflecting defendant’s statistics concerning H-1B visa applications, where defendant produced only single document that contained data table of information sought by plaintiff. Defendant failed to conduct adequate search, when it unilaterally narrowed plaintiff’s request for “all documents” to single, newly-generated statistical table. Ct. further noted that governmental agencies must be responsive to content and form of records sought by FOIA request, and instant request called for production of pre-existing documents. As such, defendant was required to perform new search of internal documents that was subject to any exemption under FOIA.