WASHINGTON / TENNESSEE — Three plaintiffs sued the federal government on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, asking a court to force U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hand over records showing what the agency has been telling local police departments and sheriffs about releasing immigration-enforcement records to the public. The American Immigration Council, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) and researcher Meghan Conley filed the lawsuit in Tennessee, according to the Council's announcement.
Source: American Immigration Council
The case is not about stopping an arrest or a deportation. It is about paperwork — and, the plaintiffs say, about whether the public, journalists and lawyers can still find out how immigration enforcement is being carried out in their own counties when the agency doing much of the work is a local sheriff or a county jail, not a federal office.
What the lawsuit asks for
According to the plaintiffs, the lawsuit seeks details of ICE's instructions to state and local law-enforcement agencies about whether to release records requested under state public-records laws. Those instructions matter because the records at issue — arrest reports, jail booking and housing records, and records of medical treatment for people held in county jails — are created by local agencies, under state law, and have for years been obtained through state open-records requests rather than through the slower federal system.
The plaintiffs say ICE has told local police and sheriffs that they need to check with federal officials before sharing certain records with the public, even when state transparency laws say otherwise. In the Council's words, that raises the concern that ICE is 'making it harder for journalists, advocates, and the general public to find out how local police and sheriffs are working with federal immigration authorities.' That is the plaintiffs' allegation; ICE has not, in the reporting available at publication, publicly answered this specific lawsuit.
The August FOIA request that came first
The lawsuit follows a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request the same plaintiffs filed in August 2026, seeking records of the instructions ICE gave to state and local law enforcement. The FOIA request document is dated August 10, 2026. According to the Council, ICE did not produce the records sought — and when a FOIA request goes unanswered, federal court is the next step available to requesters. Wednesday's filing is that step.
Source: American Immigration Council
The August request, as described by its authors, sought ICE's internal directives on this issue, emails from local law-enforcement agencies seeking guidance, and ICE's responses — records that would show, in the agency's own words, how widely the instruction was sent and what exactly local agencies were told to do.
Background: the April email and the Tennessee jail refusals
The dispute did not start in August. Writing before the lawsuit, Conley, Spring Miller of TIRRC and Raul Pinto of the Council said the Dallas Morning News had reported that in April ICE emailed jurisdictions holding 287(g) agreements — the federal programme under which local officers are deputised for immigration work — asserting that the 'prohibition on [an] agency's unilateral release of ICE information is expansive' and ordering agencies to 'immediately consult with the ICE FOIA office, ICE Public Affairs, or your local Field Office Director' before responding to any public-records requests.
Source: American Immigration Council (background explainer)
In Tennessee itself, the authors wrote, TIRRC and Conley had already requested basic records from certain Tennessee county jails that were temporarily housing people detained on ICE's behalf — 'basic records that county jails routinely create for all detainees' — and the jails refused, at ICE's direction, they said. A similar refusal was reported in Iowa, where, according to the same account, Muscatine County's attorney declined in February to release the county's ICE housing contract, citing ICE 'equities' in the documents and pointing the requester to the federal FOIA process instead.
The plaintiffs' central argument is a practical one: many of these records are created by a county jail or sheriff and may never be passed to ICE at all. If the local agency refuses under state law and ICE does not hold the record either, the document falls into what the Council's authors call a 'black hole for transparency' — it exists, but no records law can reach it.
The legal backdrop: a 2022 Michigan ruling
Courts have faced a version of this question before. In 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court decided ACLU of Michigan v. Calhoun County Sheriff's Office, a case in which a sheriff's office tried to withhold records about a U.S. citizen who had been detained in the county jail and then transferred to ICE custody, relying on a federal immigration regulation. According to the Council's account of the ruling, Michigan's top court was unpersuaded: state law allowed withholding when a federal law prohibits disclosure, and a regulation, the court held, is not a law — and the requested records were not even in ICE's possession. The Tennessee lawsuit will test how far that reasoning, and federal FOIA law, reach in this newer dispute; that outcome is for the court, not yet decided.
Why this lands now: local officers are doing more of the work
The records fight arrives in the same week as new figures on how much immigration enforcement has shifted to local officers. A FWD.us report released October 27–28 estimated that more than 29,000 state and local officers are now deputised under ICE's 287(g) programme — more than double ICE's own roughly 11,600 deportation officers — and that deputised officers made more than 47,000 immigration arrests between January 2025 and early August 2026. As Awaaz Punjab reported in its coverage of that report, the more enforcement moves to routine traffic stops and county jails, the more the paper trail lives in local filing cabinets — which is precisely the trail this lawsuit is about.
What it means for diaspora and Punjabi readers in the US
For immigrant communities — including Punjabi families in Tennessee and across the South, and the truckers who pass through its counties on I-40, I-75 and I-24 — local records are often the first way a family, a lawyer or a community organisation can establish where a detained person was held, which agency held them, and what happened while they were there. If those records require a federal lawsuit to obtain, that information arrives months later, if at all. Supporters of ICE's approach, in the wider national debate, argue that coordinating releases protects enforcement operations and sensitive information; the Department of Homeland Security has described local-federal cooperation programmes such as 287(g) as a critical tool against crime and illegal immigration. Both positions are now before a court in this records case.
What happens next
The lawsuit seeks a court order compelling disclosure; the filing itself does not grant one, and no hearing date or government response deadline was reported in the plaintiffs' announcement. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security will have the opportunity to respond in court, and Awaaz Punjab will update this story when the government files its answer or the court sets a schedule. Separately, a different group of legal-services organisations filed a related-but-distinct case in Boston on the same day, October 28, challenging ICE's separate policy of removing people with final removal orders from the online detainee locator — a reminder that the fight over immigration-enforcement information is now running on several court fronts at once.