Watchdog Sues State Department to Force Release of Docs on Van Hollen El Salvador Junket to Aid MS-13er
Judicial Watch is asking a federal court to order the U.S. Department of State to turn over all official documents concerning Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen’s (Md.) recent trip to El Salvador to aid deported illegal immigrant and accused MS-13 gang member and human trafficker Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the nonprofit government watchdog told the court that on April 22, 2025, it filed a request with the State Department for “any and all records concerning, regarding, or relating to the April 2025 visit to El Salvador by Senator Chris Van Hollen. This request includes, but is not limited to, all related agendas, briefing materials, and records of communications.”
The State Department acknowledged receiving the Judicial Watch FOIA request and assigning it a processing number. In a May 29, 2025 email, the government told Judicial Watch that its Van Hollen request was “In Process.” But then just four minutes after sending the “In Process” email, Judicial Watch received another email from the State Department saying its request processing was “closed.”
Judicial Watch told the court that it “has received no further communication from the State Department regarding the request” since the “closed” email.
The federal FOIA law requires federal agencies and departments to provide all official documents requested by any individual citizen or group of citizens within 20 business days, except those covered by a series of exemptions such as personal privacy, protecting commercial secrets, and national security considerations.
The law further requires officials to explain to a requester which documents it opted to withhold and why each of those documents was covered by an exemption. If a particular requested document cannot be found or is thought to have been lost or destroyed, officials are also required to provide an explanation for such circumstances.
To date, the State Department has not explained why it closed the Judicial Watch request without providing any documents or a required explanation for its actions.
In its suit, Judicial Watch asked the court to “(1) order Defendant to search for any and all records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request and demonstrate that it employed search methods reasonably likely to lead to the discovery of records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request; (2) order Defendant to produce, by a date certain, any and all nonexempt records responsive to Plaintiff’s request and a Vaughn index of any responsive records withheld under claim of exemption; (3) enjoin Defendant from continuing to withhold any and all non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request; [and] (4) grant Plaintiff an award of attorneys’ fees and other litigation costs reasonably incurred in this action …”
Judicial Watch has filed thousands of FOIA requests and obtained critically important documents that exposed waste, fraud, prevarication, coverups, and criminal wrongdoing in countless federal government scandals since the nonprofit’s founding in 1994.
Van Hollen’s April 17 trip to El Salvador was paid for with taxpayer dollars. The day before the senator departed for the Latin American country to which Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials had deported Garcia, federal immigration officials released documentation that Garcia was associated with MS-13, one of the most violent and murderous of the many Latin and South American criminal gangs.
Garcia has since been returned to America where he is being held pending further litigation in his case in a federal prison in Tennessee.
The Judicial Watch suit seeking to force the State Department to release the Garcia documents comes as something of a surprise since that agency has an above-average record for responding promptly to simple FOIA requests, according to data maintained by foia.gov.
On average, the State Department responds as required by the FOIA law within 15.49 days of receiving a request judged not to be complex or to require a time-consuming and costly search for older documents that may be difficult to locate in official archives. But the department’s record is much worse when requests are considered complex, requiring an average of 564 days.
The Washington Stand recently reported, based on official data compiled by Open the Books, that many federal agencies and departments are guilty of taking hundreds more days than required by the FOIA law to respond to requesters.
Government-wide, the average response time for simple requests of 836 days was compiled by the Commerce Department’s Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Affairs. The second-longest wait time among federal departments and agencies was 811 by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Enterprise Integration.
Third among the longest wait times was the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) at 367 days. The fourth-longest average wait was registered by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board at 360 days, followed in fifth by the Executive Office of the President in the White House at 350 days.
The five federal agencies with the fastest average turnaround time in responding to simple FOIA requests include the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at one day, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) at 1.69 days, followed by the Job Corps, the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) at two days. The average response time for all federal departments and agencies for complex requests was 267 days.
AUTHOR
Mark Tapscott
Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.
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