Two civil-rights groups are citing an obscure law to force the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to correct a recent report on immigration and terrorism that they say “fails to meet the basic information quality standards required by federal law.” Democracy Forward and Muslim Advocates have written to both departments arguing their joint Jan. 16 report, claiming 73 percent of international terrorism convictions are attributable to foreign-born individuals, violates the 2000 Information Quality Act.

“We request that you retract the report, and to the extent that you determine that publishing a revised report is necessary, include in it data that avoids the errors identified below, or, to the extent the Departments do not have relevant data, to admit as much,” the groups write.

The Daily Beast has reported that professional terrorism researchers consider the document to have omitted data that would contradict its conflation of immigration and terrorism, such as directly relevant domestic-terrorism data, and excluded DHS analysts who warned its focus was misleading. The civil-rights groups’ letter also says that by the document’s own criteria, only 46 percent of people charged or convicted of international terrorism offenses were foreign-born.

— Spencer Ackerman