Van Der Hout LLP v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 24-cv-1095 (N.D. Cal.)
This Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeks records explaining how and why the U.S. government admitted Israel into the Visa Waiver Program despite Israel’s differential treatment of Palestinian Americans.
The U.S. Visa Waiver Program allows people from specific countries to travel to the U.S. for up to 90 days without applying for a visa. A key part of this program is that it is reciprocal; a country must extend the same privilege to all U.S. passport holders. For more than a decade, the U.S. rejected Israel’s requests to join the program, in part because Israel insisted on applying different standards to Americans of Palestinian descent. That changed in 2023, when the two governments signed an agreement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved Israel for admission into the Visa Waiver Program. By the government’s own public description, the agreement still subjects Palestinian Americans, including U.S. citizens living in Gaza and the West Bank, to different entry procedures than other Americans. Within weeks of the designation, Israel barred Palestinian Americans from entering the West Bank, and U.S. officials reportedly told Israel it was violating the agreement.
The full terms of that agreement have never been made public. In October 2023, Van Der Hout LLP filed a FOIA request with DHS and the Department of State for the Memorandum of Understanding that was executed and any later changes to it. Neither agency produced a single record. This lawsuit asks a federal court to order them to do so, so that the public can see the terms under which the government set aside a requirement it had enforced for decades and how it plans to hold Israel to the rules of the program going forward.