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A lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeks access to public records involving the arrests last summer of more than 400 illegal immigrants in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. In June, a small group of Temecula-based Border Patrol agents set off a panic among immigrants by beginning to patrol and arrest people in cities far north of the border, including Corona and Ontario. The next month, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about whether the Border Patrol was acting lawfully. The organization asked for details about the people involved and their interactions with the Border Patrol, methods used during the sweeps, records of involvement by local and state law enforcement, and communications approving the patrols. Legally, the agency had 20 days to respond. It did not answer until September, when the U.S. Customs and Border Protection wrote back to say it could not process requests "on a timely basis" because of a large number of requests and limited resources. The letter did not say if or when the records would be released. "As a result of Customs and Border Protection's violation of its duties under the Freedom of Information Act, the public's wide-ranging questions about the raids of June 2004 -- including why the raids occurred, whether they were in fact authorized, and whether people's constitutional rights were violated -- remain unanswered," ACLU staff attorney Ranjana Natarajan wrote. Border Patrol officials did not respond to phone calls requesting comment. When word of the patrols spread in June, some residents in heavily Latino neighborhoods said they were afraid to go out in public and denounced the stops as racial profiling. Agents said that the deportations were routine and that the arrests resulted from consensual conversations between agents and members of the public. [more]