WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., against the Trump administration on behalf of the Guardian, seeking to compel the release of federal I-213 deportation records. The Guardian subsequently received and released spreadsheets containing data extracted from those forms, covering fiscal year 2023 through August 2025.

The Guardian had filed a series of records requests seeking the I-213 forms, which are filled out by federal immigration officers when a noncitizen is apprehended. When the government did not respond to those requests, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press initiated litigation to compel disclosure.

Donald Trump entered his second term as president promising mass deportations and pledging to target what he described as the worst of the worst. The Guardian used the I-213 data to investigate government claims about immigrants and their criminal convictions, as well as the impact of the deportation campaign on families.

The spreadsheets contain biographical details about each person recorded on the forms, including criminal history and the number and nationalities of their children under the age of 18. The Guardian released all documents it received through the lawsuit, with the data minimally processed to remove potentially identifiable information.

To broaden the scope of its analysis, the Guardian combined the I-213 records with data released by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The two datasets were merged by filtering both to the same date range and matching records using apprehension date, area of responsibility, age, gender, and apprehension site. Through that process, the Guardian matched 86 percent of the I-213 records with unique records in the Deportation Data Project files.