The Trump administration is violating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to release documents about “politically motivated” immigration enforcement and mass deportations, a lawsuit filed Friday in Washington, D.C., alleges.

In a 30-page complaint, American Oversight, a transparency-focused nonprofit organization, accuses various departments and government agencies of repeatedly violating FOIA law on multiple distinct requests over the past few months.

“The American people deserve full transparency about what”s driving this administration’s sweeping immigration raids,” American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in a press release announcing the litigation. “From arrests in schools and churches to raids on small businesses and farms, the administration’s immigration enforcement has disproportionately targeted our most vulnerable — including children, low-income workers, and immigrant communities.”

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The filing portrays an immigration agenda cloaked in the language of public safety and used as a means to enforce President Donald Trump’s political agenda and reward his allies.

“American Oversight brings this action in response to the Trump Administration’s mass deportation efforts, which have become increasingly aggressive, sweeping, and — by the President’s own tacit admission — politically motivated,” the lawsuit reads. “Specifically, he has directed immigration enforcement agencies ‘to do all in their power’ to detain and deport undocumented immigrants in ‘America’s largest cities,’ which the President characterized as the ‘core of the Democrat Power Center.’ In doing so, he invoked unfounded conspiracy theories about non-citizen voting, further revealing that these efforts are driven less by public safety concerns than by partisan objectives.”

The group cites a litany of immigration-related news to make its point about the government’s immigration enforcement priorities. To hear the plaintiffs tell it, the Trump administration telegraphed a focus on deporting criminals while performing high-profile detentions of college students and visa holders, before shifting enforcement priorities away from agricultural and hospitality industries and back again, both times in response to political blowback.

American Oversight says it aimed “to shed light on the Administration’s shifting immigration enforcement priorities, the political considerations driving those actions, and the internal decision-making processes behind this unprecedented escalation in immigration enforcement.”

The lawsuit stems from a series of FOIA requests. The first was submitted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Jan. 28.

According to the lawsuit, that FOIA request sought a series of communications to and from various DHS officials that contained references to keywords and terms like “school,” “university,” place of worship,” “mosque,” “temple,” “synagogue,” “sensitive zone,” “protected area,” “community zone” and various others.

To help contextualize the request and help the records custodian limit the number of responses, the FOIA request clarified:

Records reflecting any final formal or informal directives (including informal email communications), guidance, protocol, or policies regarding rescinding the former sensitive locations policy…
Records reflecting any final formal or informal directives (including informal email communications), guidance, protocol, or policies issued to federal immigration enforcement officers regarding deportation and arrest priorities…
Records reflecting any final formal or informal directives (including informal email communications), guidance, protocol, or policies regarding the arrest of individuals in former sensitive locations, including schools, hospitals, or places of worship.

On Feb. 21, American Oversight submitted a second request seeking communications to and from a second group of DHS officials.

Throughout January and February, the group sent – sometimes substantially – similar FOIA requests to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Labor (DOL). Some of the additional FOIA requests identified different sets of keywords. Other words and terms include, for example: “migrant,” “foreign national,” “round up,” “raid,” “undocumented,” “noncitizen,” “I-9,” and “e-verify.” All of those requests concerned immigration enforcement priorities and sought communications.

Then, in April, the group sent ICE another FOIA request for constitutional keywords like: “Fourth Amendment,” “search and seizure,” “warrant,” “warrantless,” and “probable cause.”

While the government, in each instance, acknowledged receipt of each FOIA request and assigned tracking numbers, American Oversight “has not received any further correspondence or a final determination” from any of the five agencies in question, according to the lawsuit.

American Oversight says both ICE and USCIS invoked a statutory 10-day extension of the timelines in the FOIA statute, but have not received an update from either agency since then. As far as the DOL is concerned, the agency said the request had been “classified as ‘complex’ due to ‘unusual circumstances'” and that they therefore would not be able to respond “within the time limits established by FOIA,” according to the lawsuit.