Federal judge blocks Trump policy of making arrests at immigration courts nationwide

A California federal judge ruled ICE's courthouse arrest policy was "arbitrary and capricious," issuing a nationwide block on the practice.

A federal judge in California blocked the Trump administration's policy of making immigration arrests at courthouses nationwide. (Scripps News)

Priscilla Alvarez
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A federal judge in California on Tuesday issued a nationwide block against the Trump administration’s policy of making arrests at immigration courts, putting an end to a practice that garnered national attention.

Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began detaining migrants in courthouse hallways across the country, sometimes moments after pleading their cases. The move raised alarm among attorneys and advocates who said the practice was turning immigration courts from places of due process into zones of fear and punishing people who were following the rules.

Tuesday’s ruling marks a major blow to the Trump administration, which rescinded long-held guidance that had limited immigration enforcement in or near courthouse, though the White House on Tuesday also notched a legal victory in its mass deportation efforts in a separate case.

In the courthouse arrests case, Trump officials had argued the previous guidance hampered the ability of immigration enforcement officers to apprehend dangerous individuals.

In a 71-page ruling, Judge P. Casey Pitts acknowledged the “chilling effect” of ICE’s policy, finding that it was “arbitrary and capricious.”

“For the avoidance of doubt, simply extending the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies to cover immigration courthouses would not cure those policies’ fatal defects. As the Court has previously detailed, 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 said.

“In sum, ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policies are devoid of rational explanation for (or even acknowledgement of) the agency’s choices (1) to remove its earlier restrictions on civil arrests at immigration courthouses and (2) not to extend the new policies’ limitations to immigration courthouses,” Pitts added.

Jordan Wells, senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, applauded the ruling.

“The courthouse is meant to be a refuge for the pursuit of justice, not a hunting ground for ICE. No immigrant, whether appearing in San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, or New York, should be forced to choose between their liberty and their day in court,” Wells said in a statement to CNN.

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Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival also weighed in on the ruling on X, saying: “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. A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”

Also on Tuesday, a federal appeals court in DC handed President Donald Trump a significant win in his mass deportation efforts in a different case. The ruling allows the administration to cast a wider net over who is subject to “expedited removal,” which lets authorities remove an individual from the country without a hearing before an immigration judge.