Update DHS issuances to limit Privacy Act protections to U.S. persons and LPRs

Research notes

Not started, on the one negative search we ran for the asks on CRCL, the Privacy Office and the two ombudsmen. The instrument would be an update to DHS’s Privacy Policy Guidance Memoranda (the 2017-01 memorandum is the one that extends administrative Privacy Act protections beyond U.S. persons and LPRs).

• https://www.dhs.gov/privacy-policy-guidance still redirects to https://www.dhs.gov/archive/privacy-policy-guidance, which still returns page not found (re-checked 2026-09-06). That remains a lead, not Evidence: a dead archive page does not prove a memorandum was rescinded.

• DHS’s privacy library searched, 2026-09-06; the Status did not change, and this is the useful part. We had recorded that the question “cannot be settled from here” without a person reading the site in a browser. A browser would not have helped, and a working index did. DHS’s privacy Publications Library does honor its search query, unlike the department-wide publications library search, which we found discarding one: a search for “guidance memorandum” returns four Privacy Policy Guidance Memoranda, and a nonsense term, “zzqxwrflub”, returns “There are no results to display” at 108,178 bytes against 111,900 for the real term. Control-tested, so its negatives count. What it returns:

  • “Privacy Policy Guidance Memorandum” → four documents, all pre-2012: 2008-02 (privacy impact assessments), 2009-01 (information sharing environment), 2011-01 (Privacy Act amendment requests), 2011-02 (shared IT services). No memorandum issued inside the evidence window appears at all.
  • “2017-01” → nothing. “mixed system” → nothing. “Judicial Redress” → nothing. The 2017-01 memorandum is not in the library, and the two plausible PDF addresses in DHS’s publications folder both return page not found.
  • So the department’s privacy guidance index is published and current, and the memorandum this ask would have to be carried out against is not in it. Two readings survive that fact and the record cannot choose between them: 2017-01 was rescinded, or 2017-01 was simply dropped from the library along with the guidance index page. Neither is an in-window DHS issuance confining Privacy Act protections to U.S. persons and LPRs, which is what the Quote asks for, so the Status is unchanged either way. It moves the day a memorandum appears, and this library is where it would appear.

• Federal Register full-text searches over the window for “Privacy Policy 2017-01” (0), “Mixed Systems” (0), and “Privacy Act” + “lawful permanent residents” + “exclude” (4, none DHS-issuance-changing) found nothing; “Judicial Redress Act” returns six documents, all routine SORNs and two unrelated rules.

• Executive Order 14159 — the order that carries most of this Mandate chapter — has no Privacy Act section; the first-term equivalent was EO 13768 section 14, and no reinstatement of it was found.