In A.R.R. v. Rubio, six Afghan asylees living in Colorado sued the Secretary of State and the Department of State under the Administrative Procedure Act, challenging State Department cables implementing presidential proclamations that suspended entry from Afghanistan and blocked approval of their Form I-730 petitions to bring family members from Afghanistan to the United States; they also alleged unreasonable delay in adjudicating those petitions and sought to litigate under pseudonyms due to safety risks. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the plaintiffs’ motion to proceed pseudonymously. Applying the five-factor balancing test from In re Sealed Case, the court found that the first two factors favored anonymity because the case involved sensitive asylum matters and credible fears of Taliban retaliation against the plaintiffs and their families; the third factor strongly supported it given that 16 of the 30 plaintiffs are minors; the fourth was mixed because the suit sought both programmatic and individual relief against the government; and the fifth favored pseudonymity since the defendants already knew the plaintiffs’ identities. On balance, the court concluded that the plaintiffs had overcome the presumption in favor of public disclosure of litigants’ names.
The case arose after the Government issued two grand-jury subpoenas to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors seeking records on building renovations and related congressional testimony by Chair Jerome Powell; the district court previously quashed the subpoenas, finding they were issued to harass Powell over policy disagreements with the President rather than any good-faith criminal inquiry. After closing its investigation without appealing, the Government moved to vacate that opinion and order, arguing that any appeal would now be moot and that the decision should be erased to avoid legal consequences. The court denied the motion. It reasoned that vacatur is an extraordinary equitable remedy, that the Government had voluntarily created the alleged mootness by dropping the case and declining to appeal, and that the decision carried no precedential weight and only negligible preclusive risk—particularly against the Government—while the public interest and fairness to the prevailing party favored preserving it.
In Anderson v. BDO USA, P.C., a 70-year-old former Managing Director at the accounting firm alleged age discrimination under the D.C. Human Rights Act after being terminated for refusing a proposed shift from salaried pay to an hourly structure with reduced compensation and work limits. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied BDO’s motion for summary judgment. The court determined that BDO’s stated reason—Anderson’s low billable hours and utilization rate—was a legitimate nondiscriminatory explanation that could be rebutted, as a reasonable jury could find it pretextual given the lack of any contemporaneous records setting productivity targets, internal emails discussing a “nudge” toward retirement, and the abrupt compensation proposal that would have sharply cut his pay. The court concluded that the record permitted an inference that age was a substantial motivating factor in the employment decision.
In this FOIA case, pro se plaintiff Darryl C. Carter sought to compel the FBI to produce a broad array of unfiltered documents, emails, and other records related to electronically submitted formal complaints and tips received between June 1 and 22, 2021. After Carter declined to narrow his request despite agency outreach, the FBI conducted a search that identified over 2 million potentially responsive pages, produced 1,475 pages consistent with his stated $50 duplication fee limit, and withheld 73 pages under Exemptions 6, 7(C), and 7(E). The court granted the government’s unopposed motion for summary judgment, finding that the agency’s declarations established an adequate search reasonably calculated to locate responsive records, that fee-based processing and limited production complied with FOIA obligations, and that the withholdings properly protected personal privacy interests and non-public law-enforcement techniques without any contrary evidence from Carter.
In Warren v. Islamic Republic of Iran, victims of a Taliban-linked bombing in Afghanistan’s diplomatic quarter and their family members sued Iran for allegedly supporting the perpetrators, with some plaintiffs seeking to proceed under pseudonyms due to fears of retaliation. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the motion for pseudonymity at this preliminary stage for plaintiffs living in or with family in Afghanistan. Applying the five-factor balancing test from In re Sealed Case, the court found that the risk of physical harm from the Taliban—based on the plaintiffs’ prior targeting for U.S. employment—outweighed the presumption of public disclosure, particularly given the involvement of minors and the fact that Iran would receive the real names under seal with no demonstrated prejudice. The ruling is subject to later review by the assigned district judge.
In Doe v. Islamic Republic of Iran, a naturalized U.S. citizen and journalist who had reported critically on the Iranian government sued Iran and its agencies under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, alleging that Iranian agents had arrested his relatives, issued death threats, and carried out multiple physical attacks on him in retaliation for his work. The plaintiff moved to proceed under a pseudonym to shield his identity from public disclosure. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the motion. Applying the five-factor balancing test from D.C. Circuit precedent, the court found that the need to protect sensitive safety concerns and avoid retaliatory harm to the plaintiff and his family outweighed the public interest in open proceedings, that suing a foreign government for damages supported anonymity, and that defendants would face no prejudice because the plaintiff offered to disclose his identity to them under seal.
