A federal judge in California on Tuesday halted the Trump administration’s policy allowing immigration authorities to arrest migrants at courthouses, issuing a nationwide order that temporarily stops the practice.
The policy, introduced last year, enabled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to detain migrants inside or around immigration courts, often immediately after their hearings.
The move drew widespread criticism from lawyers who argued that the immigration courts were turning into zones of fear due to the practice, and people were being discouraged from attending court proceedings.
The ruling is a significant setback for the Trump administration, which had reversed earlier restrictions on immigration enforcement at or near
courthouses. The administration had defended the policy, saying it gave ICE greater flexibility to detain individuals considered a threat to public safety.
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In his 71-page ruling, Judge P. Casey Pitts said ICE’s courthouse arrest policy had a “chilling effect” on migrants seeking legal relief, describing it as “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,” he added.
Meanwhile, Jordan Wells, senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Fransico Bay Area, welcomed the ruling.
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“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, while speaking to CNN.
Speaking on the ruling, Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival wrote on X, “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.”
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