The most popular names for drug-sniffing dogs are ██████ and █████
And other notes from August, including: a lawsuit against USCIS over an asylum application, a FOIA lawsuit against U.S. CBP and other random cases pending in the Southern District of California
Earlier this month I filed what I thought was a wholesome, noncontroversial FOIA request with U.S. Customs and Border Protection asking for the names of narcotic detection dogs employed by the agency.
In a running post, I’ve been documenting the names of those dogs as I come across them in federal court documents about drug smuggling cases.
Since CBP agents already make the names of their K9 partners public in documents that are readily available online, I thought it would be easy enough to get a complete list.
Instead, I got a spreadsheet with a column called “Canine Name” and 548 rows of “(b)(6), (b)(7)(C),” which are commonly cited FOIA exemptions on personal privacy grounds.
CBP also gave me a second spreadsheet that lists 384 narcotic detection dogs that have retired over the last five years. All their names are also (b)(6) and (b)(7)(C).
I already filed an appeal and will keep you posted.
They did at least give me a list of each dog’s breed. So here is a pie chart with the top five dog breeds that are currently working for CBP:
There are also seven mixed breed, three golden retrievers, three wirehaired pointers, one groenendael, one “Tervu” (presumably Belgian tervuren) and one vizsla.
Some other interesting things I found over the last month: