“You can’t see what’s going on in FOIA in government if you have immigration records included,” said the second-in-command at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Privacy Office.1 Otherwise put, immigration is so dominant in FOIA that it either explains or obscures FOIA practices, depending on how you look at it. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which immigration-related requests – namely requesters seeking their own immigration files – are driving FOIA numbers government-wide. Most apparently, immigration requests are responsible for the overwhelming volume of requests at the DHS components – including US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and others. And since DHS now receives nearly half of the federal government’s total requests, that alone suggests immigration’s outsized presence. But beyond DHS, immigration requests are also contributing a significant volume of requests at the State Department, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and, to a lesser extent, some fraction of requests at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL).