milagros.reyes@ci.irs.gov EB-5 Emails

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request the following records:

I would like to obtain all emails sent to, from, or copied to milagros.reyes@ci.irs.gov, from January 1, 2016 to Present Day, containing at least one of the following the non-case-sensitive key-strings: "EB-5", "USCIS", or "Trump".

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 20 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Taylor Amarel

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request the following records:

I would like to obtain all emails sent to, from, or copied to milagros.reyes@ci.irs.gov, from January 1, 2016 to Present Day, containing at least one of the following the non-case-sensitive key-strings: "EB-5", "USCIS", or "Trump".

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 20 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Taylor Amarel

To whom this may concern,

I respectfully dispute the stance that a fix is needed and that the records are too broadly described. (Also worth noting is that I did not receive a response within 20 days). In relation to my request (and why it is not too broad), I must point out that the IRS and other federal agencies have conducted mechanically equivalent searches of email records and by its very nature, the request is not ambiguous or cumbersome to complete. Because these emails, by their very nature, are text searchable, you can simply conduct a "grep" or search query of the email records.

For your reference, here is FOIA request that was mechanically equivalent that was conducted by the IRS -

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/lindajmccartyirsgov-keyword-emails-48334/

Given this previous request, I am uncertain why this request is being treated differently. Furthermore, in this request, the IRS was correctly able to review the records and redact certain portions of confidential information (as required by FOIA law). It is against FOIA law to redact and withhold the entirety of documents requested when the sensitive portions of the documents could be redacted in part.

Although I wish to reserve the right to pursue the original request in full, should it be helpful you may exclude emails that may be categorized as "newsletters", or "industry alerts". You may also exclude spam or junk mail. In accordance with PA, you may also redact information of non-government officials such as tax transcripts or email addresses/contact information.

Finally, I am once again perplexed as to why this request is being determined as "too broad" and that the IRS doesn't know where it stores its emails. Because the records of text searchable, there is no undue burden placed on the IRS.

If you can not administratively accept that this request is identical to my previous requests, such as https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/lindajmccartyirsgov-keyword-emails-48334/, please move this towards appeals while simultaneously conducting a keyword search of the email records to determine how many records match the provided keywords. If the IRS can provide me with the number of emails that match each keyword I may be more able to limit the scope of my request.

To whom this may concern,

Please see the attached document.

Thank you.
Taylor

For your reference, here is another FOIA request that was properly completed and is identically equivalent to the one that your agency just closed.

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/eb-5-irs-criminal-investigation-acting-special-agent-in-charge-anthony-j-orlando-46449/

Once again, I ask that you clarify why this request is being treated differently than the others.

To whom this may concern,

A certified letter was sent to you for your review containing the appeal information. I hope to receive the records soon.

Taylor Amarel

To Whom It May Concern:

I wanted to follow up on the following Freedom of Information Act request, copied below, and originally submitted on April 21, 2018. Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response. You had assigned it reference number #F18113-0041.

Thanks for your help, and let me know if further clarification is needed.