Washington DC - President Donald Trump's administration is withholding documents and redacting information about people's immigration status, migration lawyers have claimed.

Dozens of immigration lawyers have revealed that migrants are being denied access to, or provided with heavily redacted paperwork, when requesting documents from immigration authorities.

According to an investigation by the New York Times, which saw nearly three dozen lawyers interviewed, government agencies have repeatedly claimed that they could not find documents that both migrants and their lawyers know exist.

These include things like expired passports, or parts of prior applications, as well as citizenship documentation for the parents of adoptees, immigration interview transcripts, and other paperwork relating to individuals' immigration history and status.

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Legal professionals are concerned because the US government is required to provide these documents when requested by migrants, regardless of their status. Nightingale v. USCIS in 2020 established that such paperwork must be provided within 30 days.

To make matters worse, migrants in some cases face deportation from the US if they cannot provide certain documents to immigration authorities.

"Delays and redactions pile on to the many other intentional ways immigrants are being deprived of due process in immigration court," Kelly Rojas, a lawyer working for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, told the NYT.

When reached out to for comment, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said that delays have been caused because of a combination of strict privacy laws and an unmanageable number of Freedom of Information Act requests made every day.

"Many people who request records have similar names, birth dates and countries of birth," a USCIS spokesperson said.

Having interviewed dozens of immigration lawyers, the NYT revealed a series of shocking stories which saw otherwise-documented migrants mistreated, deported, and imprisoned in detention camps, all because they were not provided with the correct paperwork.