Vexatious Requestors / Vexsome Filers / Litigious FOIA Requestors / Frequent Flyers List (Department of Homeland Security)

To Whom It May Concern:

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

Any list of Freedom of Information Act requestors identified as vexatious, vexsome, litigious, burdensome or otherwise designated for specialized processing, supervisory-level or legal-counsel-level review, or tracking by your agency's FOIA office.

By way of example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has maintained a "Vexsome Filer" list for years, according to records released by expert FOIA requestor and journalist John Greenwald: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/fbi-issues-redacted-vexsome-filer-list-marking-departure-from-past-transparency-practices/.

Please task a search beginning on January 1, 2023, and continuing until the day on which your FOIA office initiates the search.

Please search your FOIA office first, but, in accordance with Iturralde, follow up on any obvious leads.

I am willing to this request if the volume of documents returned exceeds 500 pages.

I hereby request expedited processing of this request, and pursuant to 6 CFR 5.5(e), I make the following statements under penalty of perjury pursuant to 28 USC 1746:

1. I am a member of the media primarily engaged in information dissemination.
2. I have submitted more than 200 FOA requests to DHS agency FOIA offices since May 2019.
3. The vast majority of these requests remain in extended backlogs, often with processing times that far exceed the median and average times reported by the agency.
4. DHS Agency FOIA offices have repeatedly excepted my requests from a first-in, first-out processing by providing responses to FOIA requests that contain the same information I sought, despite their filing the request after I did.
5. DHS has not promulgated any regulation or published any subregulatory rule, policy, procedure, guidance, manual, or other instruction to staff regarding the targeting or use of a vexsome filer or similar designation.
6. Consequently, any application of such internal designation to requests I have submitted would appear violate 5 USC 552(a)(2)(E)(i) & (ii).
7. DHS FOIA offices have repeatedly been held to engage in a pattern and practice of FOIA violations by federal courts. See, e.g., Owen v. ICE (CD Cal), Nightengale v. USCIS (ND Cal).
8. There is an urgency to inform the public about actual or alleged government misconduct - namely, the use/misuse of a vexsome FOIA filer list to deny, slow, or meter requestors' FOIA productions based on the frequency with which we exercise our statutory rights to demand information from our (nominally) democratically accountable institutions.
9. Placing this request in the regular track for processing will doom it to multi-month, if not multi-year purgatory at your agency's current processing rate, effectively covering up the potentially unlawful practice of discriminatory treatment based on the frequency with which a particular requestor exercises their statutory right to seek information about what our government is up to.

Thank you for your timely consideration of this expedited processing request.

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,

Andrew Free