The Department of Homeland Security admitted to what experts called a “violation” of federal law when pressed by a watchdog organization in late July, according to reporting from The New York Times Friday.
American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, filed a public records request with DHS related to the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles in June. In a letter received by the organization on July 23, however, the agency said it “no longer maintained” records – specifically text messages from DHS officials and staff – as of April 9.
“(Text messages of top DHS officials) are records that must be preserved and kept because they are created in the course of conducting government business,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, speaking with The New York Times.
“If they are not preserving those records, or if they are making so they cannot search for those records, that is a violation of the Federal Records Act.”
The DHS’ failure to maintain communications as is required by law is not new under Trump’s two administrations.
Following the Jan. 6 breaching of the U.S. Capitol, the DHS secretary general requested text messages of Secret Service officers during the two-day period surrounding the attack; many of those messages were later discovered to have been deleted. Investigations are also still ongoing as to whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s aides were asked to delete messages shared on the encrypted messaging app Signal.
“You can’t hold people accountable if you don’t know what they’re doing,” said Anne Weismann, former Justice Department official and law professor at George Washington University, speaking with The New York Times. “You can’t call yourself transparent if you’re not preserving data.”
Yet despite the obvious violation of federal law, Weismann said that she did not anticipate there being any accountability for the DHS, noting that any DOJ investigation into the matter would have to be initiated by the National Archives’ top archivist, and referred to the attorney general.
Trump fired the previous head of the National Archives, Colleen Shogan, leaving her duties to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a staunch Trump ally who has given no indication he would challenge the president.
Continuing to not properly maintain internal communications, said Lauren Harper with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, would not absolve the DHS of their obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, who told The New York Times "that's not how it works."
"This is like a fire department saying, ‘we don’t have a hose, so we’re not going to put out the fires anymore,'" Harper said.