The Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Essex County Sheriff’s Department in a dispute over public records related to the department’s compliance with Vermont’s fair and impartial policing policy.
In the lawsuit filed Monday in Washington County Superior civil court, the ACLU of Vermont alleged that the sheriff’s department won’t electronically send the organization documents it is seeking. The department instead wants the ACLU to “inspect” the records in person.
The organization filed the public records request, it stated in the lawsuit, “to better understand the (sheriff’s department’s) practices with respect to sharing information with federal immigration authorities.”
Nothing in the state’s Public Records Act permits the custodian of a public record to “dictate” that someone seeking a public record must “inspect” it first, Lia Ernst, the ACLU of Vermont’s legal director, wrote in an email to Essex County Sheriff Trevor Colby before ultimately filing the lawsuit.
“And for good reason,” Ernst added.
“Perhaps,” Ernst wrote, “a requestor does not wish to or is not able to incur the time and expense of traveling long distances to inspect records (especially because requestors need not be Vermont or even U.S. residents), or perhaps a requestor who believes they were subjected to official misconduct would not wish to review records about that incident in the very place where the officer works.”
The ACLU of Vermont, according to the lawsuit, submitted a public records request in January 2024, following the publication of a December 2023 news story by the Community News Service, a University of Vermont-based student journalism organization.
In that story, Colby described his concerns with expanding the state’s fair and impartial policing policy.
“He emphasized that his priority is to keep residents within his jurisdiction safe, and people in his relatively remote part of the state get shaken up when they see unfamiliar folks,” the Community News Service wrote. “Up there, he said, everyone basically knows everyone.”
“Colby said he would likely call immigration authorities after a traffic stop if he thought the people in the car were undocumented,” CNS reported.
Should Colby make such a call, according to the ACLU, it “would likely violate” the fair and impartial policing policy that prohibits local, state and county law enforcement contacts with federal immigration authorities except under certain circumstances.
In its records request, the ACLU sought documents related to a number of federal agencies — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection — since January 2022.
Colby told VTDigger on Tuesday that he couldn’t say much until he had a chance to consult with legal counsel.
“If you review their filing, we made the records available to them at the office for inspection and copying at our office,” Colby said, “and they refused to come.”
Asked why he was not willing to send the information electronically, Colby replied, “That’s part of what I didn’t want to get into a lot of, but initially there were redactions that were made and there has to be explanation about those redactions for what they’re there for.”
Since then, according to Colby, the situation has changed.
“One of the federal partners sent me an email and told me they didn’t think I could disclose any of my documents with their information,” Colby said. Asked which federal entity made such a request, Colby replied, “I’m not giving that out at this time.”
In a series of emails documented in the lawsuit, Colby made clear that the nearly 50 pages of responsive documents were available for in-person review, while the ACLU argued that they ought to be sent electronically.
Ernst said Tuesday that before filing the lawsuit she had sent Colby an email laying out her organization’s legal argument.
“It’s based on a sort of combination of provisions of the Public Records Act as well as case law,” Ernst said.
In the email she sent to Colby, Ernst wrote, “The Public Records Act treats requests to inspect records held by an agency and requests for copies of those records distinctly — and gives requestors, not records custodians, the choice of which avenue to pursue.”
Lauren Hibbert, Vermont’s deputy secretary of state, said Tuesday that she couldn’t comment directly on an active lawsuit.
“I will tell you that the law as written says that you can inspect or copy records,” Hibbert said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont ACLU takes Essex County Sheriff’s Department to court in public records dispute.