US court filings keep Prince Harry's immigration forms secret
WASHINGTON, March 19, (AP): Heavily redacted court filings released Tuesday shed no fresh light on the circumstances under which Prince Harry entered the United States, the latest development in a legal fight by a conservative group that is pushing to find out whether Harry lied about past drug use on his immigration forms.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials responded to a request from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols by saying the records were being "withheld in full" and that all records are deemed "categorically exempt from disclosure.'
The case has centered on the circumstances under which Harry - the Duke of Sussex and the son of King Charles III - entered the U.S. when he and his wife Meghan Markle moved to Southern California in 2020. The Heritage Foundation sued after DHS largely rejected its Freedom of Information Act request to release Harry's records. Harry is not a party in the lawsuit.
Heritage has argued there is "intense public interest' in knowing whether Harry received special treatment during the application process, particularly after his 2023 memoir "Spare' revealed past drug use. Harry has not consented to having his records made public, said Shari Suzuki, an official handling Freedom of Information Act requests for DHS and Customs and Border Protection.
"To release (Prince Harry's) exact status could subject him to reasonably foreseeable harm in the form of harassment as well as unwanted contact by the media and others," another official, DHS chief FOIA officer Jarrod Panter, wrote.
Panter wrote that the Heritage Foundation bears "the burden of establishing that the public interest in disclosure outweighs an individual's personal privacy interests in their information and that a significant public benefit would result from the disclosure of the individual's records.'
Panter's statement to the court includes multiple pages that are entirely blacked out.
Harry wrote in "Spare' that he took cocaine several times starting around age 17. He also acknowledged using cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms.
"It wasn't very fun, and it didn't make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. To feel. To be different,' he wrote.
The U.S. routinely asks about drug use on its visa applications, a query that has been linked to travel headaches for celebrities, including chef Nigella Lawson, singer Amy Winehouse and model Kate Moss. Acknowledgment of past drug use doesn't necessarily bar people from entering or staying in the country, but answering untruthfully can have serious consequences.
In a February hearing on the issue, Judge Nichols said he was seeking to strike a balance between revealing too much information in the DHS statements and redacting them to the point of meaninglessness.
"There's a point where redactions would leave just a name or a date,' he said.
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