According to U.S. CBP, this is what 'the greatest amount of information possible' looks like
In response to a FOIA request, the agency's records say it is 'unknown' how many deaths and injuries have resulted from vehicle collisions that their agents are involved in
U.S. Customs and Border Protection can’t tell me how many people they’ve injured and killed on San Diego County roads over the last five years because it would be overly burdensome for them to review the hundreds of thousands of pages that it takes them to document that info.
But first some context.
A few months ago I wrote about a Honduran national who sued Border Patrol, which is an arm of CBP, after he found himself pinned under one of the agency’s vehicles shortly after they apprehended him.
So I filed a FOIA request asking for records showing CBP vehicle collisions in San Diego from May 21, 2019, to May 21, 2024, including location, date, time and any injuries or deaths that resulted.
The agency responded on June 25 with 18 pages of the image above, totaling 557 collisions with unspecified details. (Here’s a link to the full document.)
So basically they know which vehicles were involved in collisions and when those collisions took place, but apparently they had no idea where these collisions took place or if anyone was hurt or killed.
Definitely a contender for most useless public record that I’ve ever been given as part of a records request. But it’s hard to top the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, which once gave me a document titled “Patrol Major Issues: Aug. 17-30, 2021” with the entire rest of it blacked out.
Anyway, one of my new favorite things to do with AI is have it write FOIAs, so I asked Claude to write an appeal on the grounds that CBP did not adequately search for responsive records. I submitted it on June 26.
The records provided contain almost no substantive information, with most fields marked as "Unknown." It is not credible that CBP lacks basic information about vehicle collisions such as locations, times, injuries and deaths. This suggests that an adequate search for responsive records was not conducted.
—Claude
On Aug. 23, I received an 11-page letter saying my appeal was rejected. The data pictured above is “the greatest amount of information possible” that they can release publicly.
The letter said U.S. Border Patrol had purview over the records and it would be “unreasonably burdensome” for them to provide all the data points I asked for. That’s because they don’t keep a neat account of that data; it’s located throughout individual case files for each collision. A single case file for a collision, according to the letter, ranges from 700 to 1,500 pages.
That means the 557 collisions, and any injuries or deaths that they caused, are documented in potentially more than 800,000 pages of files.
“This is a review of at minimum 389,900 to 835,500 pages of records, if not more, which would potentially require at minimum 10 to 15 years to complete,” the letter said.
In other words, CBP can’t tell me how many people they’ve injured or killed on the roads in San Diego County because it takes them too many hundreds of thousands of pages to document that information.
Also, it’s not unheard of for a typical FOIA request to take 10 years to fulfill, so I don’t see why that should be a dealbreaker.
Lastly, it’s impossible to know the veracity of such nondescript data.
For example, the San Diego Union-Tribune just published this article about a Border Patrol agent who caused a fatal crash with a motorcyclist. The collision took place on Feb. 19, 2023, but that date is not included in the data that CBP gave me.
Is there a reason why it was excluded or is it just a lazy and incomplete accounting of the data I asked for?
Impossible to tell.
But here are a couple quick visualizations that I put together in R (with more help from Claude) based on the 557 dates of collisions they gave me:
Collisions by year
It’s interesting that collisions declined from 2020 onward, since the Covid-19 pandemic kept a lot of drivers off the roads. Although the timeframe here is limited, so it could have decreased from the years prior.
In May 2023, CBP issued a policy report about vehicular pursuits with the goal of minimizing public risk, so maybe it’s a contributing factor to the dropoff in 2023. And by my calculations, 15 collisions as of May 21, 2024, paces out to 38 by the end of the year — maybe even less, since we’re already past one of the more dangerous month for CBP collisions, as you can see below.