Parents Defending Education sued the Education Department on Thursday for Biden-era records that were not handed over during the previous administration, according to a copy of the lawsuit shared with The Daily Wire.
The parental rights group filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to compel cooperation with several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed during the Biden administration. According to the suit, the Biden administration did not make a good faith effort to comply with numerous FOIA requests filed by PDE seeking information on the department’s activities.
“The lawsuit is a culmination of PDE’s long-standing document requests that were not honored by the previous Department of Education’s leadership during the Biden Administration,” PDE Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry told The Daily Wire.
“In pursuit of its stated mission to prevent the politicization of K-12 education, PDE is looking forward to finally providing the public with information relative to the discriminatory aims of the prior Education Department, and where its taxpayer dollars were being spent,” Perry added.
Specifically, the suit seeks answers to FOIAs filed looking for records related to the National Parents and Family Engagement Council (filed July 2022), the communications of Education Department Employee Kristina Ishmael (filed December 2022), documents related to Biden’s assistant secretary of education for civil rights Catherine Lhamon (June 2023), documents related to then Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona (June 2023), and any usage of the term “from the river to the sea” by multiple Education Department employees (February 2024).
The search for communications from Ishmael asked for references to terms like “white supremacy,” “BIPOC,” “folx,” “colonizer,” and “evangelical.”
The suit says that the department has violated FOIA law by refusing to make timely responses to the requests.
“The Department has made no ‘determination’ as to PDE’s FOIA requests, made no reasonable effort to search for responsive documents, and produced no documents responsive to PDE’s FOIA request,” the suit says. “The Department’s failure to make promptly available the records sought by PDE violates FOIA and the Department’s corresponding regulations.”
Parents Defending Education would like a judge to order the department to produce the documents in question by a certain date and detail specifically why, if any, records were ruled exempt.
The lawsuit comes amid massive expected changes at the Department of Education. President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order Thursday at 4:00 p.m. that will direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start taking steps to dismantle the department.
