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A federal judge late Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from making arrests at immigration courthouses, barring the practice nationwide.
The ruling from San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) allowance of arrests at immigration courthouses was arbitrary and capricious — noting that the agency itself had waffled on what locations arrests were permitted.
“It is now clear that the lack of connection between ICE’s stated rationales for the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies and the expansion of arrests at immigration courthouses results not from merely unreasoned decisionmaking but a complete lack of decisionmaking,” Pitts wrote.
A related case in New York has previously barred immigration courthouse arrests at two locations in that state, but Pitt’s ruling is the first to apply nationwide.
In the New York case, a DOJ attorney informed the court it had made a “factual error” in asserting ICE’s 2025 policy applied to immigration courthouses, with the prosecutor telling the judge the policy “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review (‘EOIR’) immigration courts.”
Pitts, an appointee of former President Biden, referenced the debacle in his own ruling.
“The government spent more than six months arguing to this Court that ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policies represented an intentional and reasoned choice to expand arrests at immigration courthouses. The argument was unconvincing,” he wrote.
“And for more than a year after the rescission of the 2021 guidance, ICE itself represented to its DOJ counsel that the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies apply to immigration courthouses, suggesting that ICE only belatedly realized the scope of the change it had effected,” the judge continued.
“Nothing on the face of ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policies or in the administrative record suggests that ICE recognized it was removing all prior limitations on civil enforcement activities at immigration courthouses without any substitute guidance,” he added later.
Pitts found the policy violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires the government to undertake thorough evaluation of its own policy shifts before carrying out a change.
Under the Biden administration, ICE had barred civil immigration enforcement near all types of courthouses, determining that they “may chill individuals’ access to courthouses” and could “impair the fair administration of justice.”
“The policies entirely fail to address the chilling effect of courthouse arrests on noncitizens’ attendance at court proceedings, which is both a critical factor underlying ICE’s 2021 guidance and an ‘important aspect of the problem’ in its own right,” Pitts wrote.
Under President Trump, ICE not only started making arrests at courthouses but also at immigration courthouses, where those seeking asylum and who have other pending matters must appear.
Last year, agency prosecutors also began moving to voluntarily dismiss some cases — a move migrants perceived as ending efforts to remove them from the country. But without an active case, agents were then free to arrest them as they left the courthouse.
James Percival, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, bashed the ruling.
“When a judge sentences a defendant, the defendant is taken into custody. If an alien is ordered removed by an immigration judge, the same should happen,” he wrote on social platform X. “A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”
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