Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-14-05169/USCOURTS-caDC-14-05169-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Anteneh Abtew
Appellant
United States Department of Homeland Security
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued September 17, 2015 Decided December 22, 2015

No. 14-5169

ANTENEH ABTEW,

APPELLANT

v.

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY,

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:13-cv-01566)

David L. Cleveland argued the cause and filed the 

briefs for appellant. 

Peter R. Maier, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, 

argued the cause for appellee. With him on the brief were 

Vincent H. Cohen Jr., Acting U.S. Attorney, and R. Craig 

Lawrence, Assistant U.S. Attorney. Fred E. Haynes, 

Assistant U.S. Attorney, entered an appearance.

Before: ROGERS, BROWN, and KAVANAUGH, Circuit 

Judges.

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Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge

KAVANAUGH.

KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judge: Foreign citizens who are 

unlawfully in the United States may be subject to removal. 

But those who fear persecution if they return to their home 

countries may seek asylum in the United States. Under 

American immigration law, those foreign citizens have two 

opportunities to press their case for asylum. First, they may 

petition the Department of Homeland Security to grant 

asylum. Second, if that fails, they may bring their case before 

an administrative immigration court.

In 2012, Anteneh Abtew, a citizen of Ethiopia, was in the 

United States unlawfully. He feared persecution if he 

returned to Ethiopia, and he therefore applied for asylum in 

the United States. He alleged that he had suffered torture at 

the hands of the Ethiopian government and would be abused 

again if he returned. The Department of Homeland Security 

did not grant asylum to Abtew. He appealed, and his case is 

now before an immigration court.

While his case was pending in the immigration court, 

Abtew filed a FOIA request for the Department’s

“Assessment to Refer” regarding his asylum application. An 

Assessment to Refer is a short document prepared by a 

Department official after interviewing an asylum applicant. 

The Assessment summarizes the asylum interview and 

assesses the applicant’s credibility and consistency. It also 

recommends whether to grant asylum. The Department 

official who wrote the Assessment to Refer then forwards it to

a supervisor, who in turn decides whether to grant asylum.

The Department of Homeland Security concluded that its

Assessment to Refer regarding Abtew was exempt from FOIA 

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under the deliberative process privilege encompassed within 

FOIA Exemption 5. Abtew then sued in the U.S. District 

Court. As relevant here, the District Court agreed with the 

Department of Homeland Security and ruled that the 

Assessment to Refer was exempt from disclosure under 

Exemption 5. We likewise agree. Our standard of review is 

de novo, and we affirm the judgment of the District Court.

* * *

FOIA Exemption 5 exempts from public disclosure

“inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which 

would not be available by law to a party other than an agency 

in litigation with the agency.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5).

Exemption 5 incorporates the privileges that the Government 

may claim when litigating against a private party, including 

the governmental attorney-client and attorney work product 

privileges, the presidential communications privilege, the 

state secrets privilege, and the deliberative process privilege. 

See Baker & Hostetler LLP v. Department of Commerce, 473 

F.3d 312, 321 (D.C. Cir. 2006).

Here, the Department asserts the deliberative process 

privilege. This “privilege rests on the obvious realization that 

officials will not communicate candidly among themselves if 

each remark is a potential item of discovery and front page 

news.” Department of the Interior v. Klamath Water Users 

Protective Association, 532 U.S. 1, 8-9 (2001). The privilege 

serves to preserve the “open and frank discussion” necessary 

for effective agency decisionmaking. Id. at 9. The privilege 

protects “documents reflecting advisory opinions, 

recommendations and deliberations comprising part of a 

process by which governmental decisions and policies are 

formulated.” NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 421 U.S. 132, 

150 (1975) (internal quotation marks omitted). As we have 

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stated, officials “should be judged by what they decided, not 

for matters they considered before making up their minds.” 

Russell v. Department of the Air Force, 682 F.2d 1045, 1048 

(D.C. Cir. 1982) (brackets omitted).

To qualify for the deliberative process privilege, an intraagency memorandum must be both pre-decisional and 

deliberative. See Coastal States Gas Corp. v. Department of 

Energy, 617 F.2d 854, 866 (D.C. Cir. 1980). “A document is 

‘predecisional’ if it precedes, in temporal sequence, the 

‘decision’ to which it relates.” Senate of the Commonwealth 

of Puerto Rico v. Department of Justice, 823 F.2d 574, 585 

(D.C. Cir. 1987); see also Coastal States, 617 F.2d at 866

(pre-decisional documents are “generated before the adoption 

of an agency policy”). And a document is deliberative if it is 

“a part of the agency give-and-take – of the deliberative 

process – by which the decision itself is made.” Vaughn v. 

Rosen, 523 F.2d 1136, 1144 (D.C. Cir. 1975); see also

Coastal States, 617 F.2d at 866.

In Abtew’s case, the Assessment to Refer was both predecisional and deliberative. The Assessment was predecisional; it was merely a recommendation to a supervisor. 

The supervisor, not the official writing the Assessment, made 

the final decision. The Assessment was also deliberative; it

was written as part of the process by which the supervisor 

came to that final decision. The Assessment itself had no 

“operative effect.” Sears, 421 U.S. at 160.

Abtew offers four primary objections to that

straightforward analysis.

First, Abtew argues that even if the Assessment had been

pre-decisional at one time, the Department’s supervisor 

adopted it as the “final decision.” That is incorrect. The 

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Department publicly explained its final decision through a 

Referral Notice. That Referral Notice represented the final 

decision. The Notice did not mention the Assessment at all.

Abtew responds that the supervisor who made the final 

decision initialed the Assessment to Refer. But initialing

alone does not transform the Assessment into the 

Department’s final decision. To be sure, an agency may

forfeit Exemption 5’s protection if it “chooses expressly to 

adopt or incorporate by reference an intra-agency 

memorandum previously covered by Exemption 5 in what 

would otherwise be a final opinion.” Sears, 421 U.S. at 161; 

see also Afshar v. Department of State, 702 F.2d 1125, 1143

n.22 (D.C. Cir. 1983). Initialing a memo may suggest 

approval of the memo’s bottom-line recommendation, but it 

would be wrong and misleading to think that initialing 

necessarily indicates adoption or approval of all of the 

memo’s reasoning. See Afshar, 702 F.2d at 1143 n.22; see 

also Coastal States, 617 F.2d at 866 (deliberative process 

privilege is designed “to protect against confusing the issues 

and misleading the public by dissemination of documents 

suggesting reasons and rationales for a course of action which 

were not in fact the ultimate reasons for the agency’s action”). 

Neither the Supreme Court nor any court of appeals has held 

that initialing alone renders an otherwise exempt document 

non-exempt.

1

Second, Abtew contends that the Assessment to Refer is 

not deliberative. In particular, he claims that there was no

give-and-take in the agency’s process. But the interviewing 

 1 Of course, we do not rule out the possibility that initialing a 

memo together with other circumstances might indicate agency 

adoption of that memo in some cases. But Abtew has not presented 

evidence to support that conclusion here.

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officer wrote the Assessment as a recommendation to a 

supervisor. A recommendation to a supervisor on a matter

pending before the supervisor is a classic example of a 

deliberative document. See American Federation of 

Government Employees, Local 2782 v. Department of 

Commerce, 907 F.2d 203, 208 (D.C. Cir. 1990); see also

Vaughn, 523 F.2d at 1144.

Third, Abtew asserts that the Department of Homeland 

Security is judicially estopped from invoking Exemption 5. 

Abtew maintains that the Department is estopped because it 

has not always invoked the deliberative process privilege for 

other Assessments. But the rule of judicial estoppel

“generally prevents a party from prevailing in one phase of a 

case on an argument and then relying on a contradictory 

argument to prevail in another phase.” New Hampshire v. 

Maine, 532 U.S. 742, 749 (2001). Here, Abtew is citing other 

litigation with other parties, not a past phase of this case. Put 

simply, an agency does not forfeit a FOIA exemption simply 

by releasing similar documents in other contexts. See Army 

Times Publishing Co. v. Department of the Air Force, 998 

F.2d 1067, 1071 (D.C. Cir. 1993). Indeed, that kind of

forfeiture rule would encourage agencies to voluntarily 

release fewer documents, a result in tension with FOIA’s 

broad purposes.

Fourth, apart from his FOIA claim, Abtew has sought

access to his Assessment to Refer under the procedural rules 

that govern removal proceedings before the immigration 

court. See 8 U.S.C. § 1229a. Those rules afford aliens “a 

reasonable opportunity to examine the evidence against the 

alien.” Id. § 1229a(b)(4)(B). Abtew argues that he is entitled 

to a “reasonable opportunity to examine” the Assessment 

because it may constitute “evidence against” him in the

pending immigration proceeding. But this is not the time and 

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place to raise such a claim. The rules that Abtew invokes are 

rules governing proceedings before the immigration court. 

The immigration court has not yet held its hearing on the 

merits of Abtew’s asylum claim. It is not even clear at this 

point whether or how the Assessment might be used in that 

court. In any event, if Abtew seeks the Assessment in that 

proceeding and does not receive it in a timely fashion, he may 

appeal that decision in the ordinary course. See generally 8 

U.S.C. § 1252. We take no position here on Abtew’s right to 

obtain the Assessment to Refer in that proceeding.

* * *

We affirm the judgment of the District Court.

So ordered.

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