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

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

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:

(Luke Harold/ggplot)

(courtesy of the Newport Oregon Police Department)

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: