The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has kept Prince Harry’s immigration records under wraps, releasing only heavily redacted court filings on Tuesday that offer no new insight into how the Duke of Sussex entered the United States in 2020. The documents, part of an ongoing legal battle sparked by the conservative Heritage Foundation, leave unanswered questions about whether Prince Harry misrepresented his past drug use on his visa application—or if he received special treatment when he and his wife, Meghan Markle, relocated to Southern California.
The Heritage Foundation has been relentless in its pursuit, filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit after DHS largely denied its request for Harry’s records. The group argues there’s a compelling public interest in determining if the royal, who admitted to drug use in his 2023 memoir Spare, was given preferential treatment during his immigration process. In the book, Harry detailed experimenting with cocaine starting at age 17, as well as using cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms, writing, “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.”
DHS officials, however, have pushed back hard, with Shari Suzuki, an official handling FOIA requests for DHS and Customs and Border Protection, stating that Harry has not consented to the release of his records. Chief FOIA officer Jarrod Panter added that disclosing Harry’s exact immigration status could expose him to “reasonably foreseeable harm in the form of harassment as well as unwanted contact by the media and others.” Panter’s court statement, which includes pages entirely blacked out, further argued that the Heritage Foundation must prove the public interest in disclosure outweighs Harry’s personal privacy rights—a burden the group has yet to meet, according to DHS.
The case, overseen by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, has been a slow-moving tug-of-war between transparency and privacy. Nichols, who previously ruled in 2024 that public interest didn’t justify releasing Harry’s records, reversed course earlier this month, ordering DHS to submit redacted documents for review. But the latest filings, including a heavily redacted declaration by Catrina Pavlov Keenan, reveal little, frustrating the Heritage Foundation’s quest to uncover whether Harry’s drug use—admitted publicly—aligned with what he reported on his visa application. U.S. visa forms typically ask about past and current drug use, a question that has tripped up celebrities like Nigella Lawson, Amy Winehouse, and Kate Moss, though admitting to drug use doesn’t automatically bar entry. Lying on the form, however, can lead to severe consequences, including deportation.
Judge Nichols has acknowledged the delicate balance at play, noting in a February hearing that excessive redactions could render the documents meaningless, leaving “just a name or a date.” The Heritage Foundation, undeterred, continues to press its case, framing it as a broader issue of fairness in immigration policy, especially in light of Harry’s high-profile status as the son of King Charles III. Harry himself is not a party to the lawsuit, and neither he nor his representatives have commented publicly on the matter.