Judge blocks Trump administration from arresting immigrants at courts

A federal judge in California issued a nationwide injunction against multiple Trump administration policies, among them one that allowed arrests at immigration courts and another that eliminated the cap on the amount of time an individual arrested for an alleged immigration violation can be detained. 

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts in the Northern District of California ruled in a 71-page opinion Tuesday that the policies were arbitrary and violated the Administrative Procedure Act. He said that attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review “failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions.” 

The practice of making arrests at immigration courts began during the Trump administration and enabled federal law enforcement agents to take into custody individuals who were appearing before immigration judges. 

Community leaders and Democratic lawmakers have railed against the practice, which has led to dramatic confrontations in the hallways outside courtrooms. They say the tactics used by federal immigration agents are leaving communities traumatized.

Pitts said that “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.”

The policy, Pitts said, is “based on a false premise” that ICE had properly rescinded past guidance on arrests at immigration courthouses from 2021, and “fails to provide a rational explanation” for its removal of previous limits on civil enforcement actions at immigration courts.

The detention waiver, which allowed ICE to hold detainees for more than 12 hours, also violated the Fifth Amendment rights of detainees because they were subject to “punitive conditions of confinement,” Pitts wrote.

Pitts said that ICE has held some detainees at an immigration center in San Francisco for more than 12 hours — and often overnight or for multiple days — and struck down the policy because ICE “failed to consider alternative options to address its capacity issues,” which were at the root of the policy’s implementation.

“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.”  

Separately, a federal judge in New York ruled last month that federal agents can no longer make arrests at immigration courthouses in Manhattan.

U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel, the judge in the New York case, similarly found that the Trump administration’s withdrawal of the prior limits on enforcement actions at immigration courts was “arbitrary and capricious.”