Judge blocks immigration courthouse arrests nationwide

A federal judge in California has struck down Trump administration policies that expanded arrests at immigration courthouses and allowed longer detentions in short-term immigration facilities, issuing a nationwide ruling that curbs key parts of the administration’s enforcement approach.

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California ruled Tuesday in a 71-page opinion that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review acted arbitrarily and violated the Administrative Procedure Act when they rescinded earlier limits without adequate justification.

The ruling vacated policies that had allowed federal agents to arrest noncitizens at immigration courthouses and permitted ICE to hold detainees in short-term facilities for up to 72 hours. In effect, it reinstated Biden-era limits that restricted courthouse arrests to narrow circumstances and capped short-term detention at 12 hours, The Guardian reported.

Pitts wrote that government lawyers “failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions.” He said the courthouse arrest policy rested on “a false premise” that ICE had properly rescinded 2021 guidance limiting arrests at immigration courthouses, and that the agencies failed to offer a rational explanation for removing prior restrictions on civil enforcement actions at immigration courts.

The practice of arresting people at immigration courts began during the Trump administration and allowed federal agents to take noncitizens into custody when they appeared before immigration judges. Community leaders and Democratic lawmakers have criticized the tactic, saying it has produced confrontations in courthouse hallways and traumatized communities.

Pitts rejected the administration’s justification that courthouse arrests involved unrelated violations. “ICE is not arresting individuals who appear for criminal or civil violations ‘unrelated’ to the arrest but instead arresting noncitizens based on the very immigration offenses for which the noncitizens are appearing in immigration court,” he wrote.

The case was brought by an asylum seeker who was arrested after leaving a routine hearing at a San Francisco immigration court, according to The Guardian. Previous guidance had limited courthouse arrests to situations such as national security threats, imminent danger and “hot pursuit” of someone posing a public safety risk, the ruling said.

Pitts also found that the detention policy violated the Fifth Amendment rights of detainees because they were subjected to “punitive conditions of confinement.” He said ICE held some detainees at an immigration center in San Francisco for more than 12 hours, often overnight or for multiple days, and failed to consider other ways to address capacity problems that led to the policy.

“For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” Pitts wrote, adding that federal law requires “an agency at least provide sound reasons for following its chosen course.”

The Department of Homeland Security sharply criticized 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,” DHS General Counsel James Percival wrote Tuesday night on X. “A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”

CBS News reported it had reached out to DHS for comment.

The decision follows a separate ruling last month by U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in New York, who barred federal agents from making arrests at immigration courthouses in Manhattan. Castel similarly found that the Trump administration’s withdrawal of prior limits on courthouse enforcement actions was “arbitrary and capricious.”