Federal judge rules ICE can’t make arrests at immigration courthouses

(CN) — A federal judge blocked Tuesday a new set of policies implemented by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including the new practice of arresting noncitizens at immigration courthouses, because the agency didn’t go through the proper rulemaking process.

“For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote in his 71-page ruling. The Administrative Procedure Act, he added, “demands that an agency at least provide sound reasons for following its chosen course” — which, he found, the Justice Department and ICE didn’t do.

“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 decision-making but a complete lack of decision-making,” Pitts wrote.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Nisha Kashyap, the program director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, called the nationwide ruling “tremendously significant.”

“The Trump administration has turned immigration courts into hunting grounds,” Kashyap said in a phone interview. “This order vacates the policy that allowed for those mass arrests.”

In the years between 2014 and 2025, it was ICE policy to only arrest noncitizens at courthouses who were high-risk, like those already convicted of a crime or who were suspected of being terrorists, spies or members of criminal gangs. In 2021, ICE further restricted itself to enforcement actions only against individuals who presented a national security threat or an immediate risk of destroying evidence.

That abruptly changed after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time. In May 2025, ICE and the DOJ adopted a new policy, allowing for civil enforcement actions whenever “credible information … leads them to believe” that the noncitizen they seek to arrest “will be present” at a courthouse. Though the policy did not mention immigration courts specifically, in practice, agents targeted those courthouses. One immigration judge has said in a declaration that she “noticed a dramatic decline in attendance at master calendar hearings in [her] courtroom," thanks to increased ICE presence in her court.

Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, an asylum-seeker from Guatemala, sued the federal government in August after she was arrested while leaving a routine hearing at the San Francisco immigration court and then detained. Two others were later added in an amended complaint. The three plaintiffs challenged the new ICE policy of making arrests at immigration courts and other new Trump-era practices, like the waiving of what was once a 12-hour limit on detention in short-term holding facilities. The plaintiffs also accused ICE of depriving detainees in a holding facility in San Francisco of “adequate hygiene and sanitation, sleep, medical care and access to counsel.” The plaintiffs also sought class action status, which Pitts approved on Tuesday.

Pitts had previously rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit and had also granted a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction requiring Pablo Sequen’s immediate release and “enjoining the government from re-detaining her absent prior notice and a hearing before an immigration judge at which the government demonstrated a valid basis for her detention.” The government has appealed the preliminary injunction, an appeal that is still pending.

On Tuesday, Pitts ruled in favor of the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and invalidated “courthouse-arrest policies and ICE’s 12-hour-detention waiver” under the Administrative Procedure Act. He called the courthouse-arrest policies “an irrational departure” from the 2021 rules and said they “failed to display a conscious awareness that [they were] rescinding an arrest policy applicable to immigration courts.”

“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,” Pitts wrote. “The argument was unconvincing.”

While the government pointed out that law enforcement agencies routinely arrest suspects at courthouses, Pitts found the analogy didn’t apply since 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 government had also cited a need to “reduce public safety risks,” but, Pitts wrote, it had failed “to explain how public safety is improved by unfettered arrests at immigration courthouses of the many noncitizens whom ICE has determined do not endanger public safety.”

As to detaining people in short-term holding facilities for days on end, Pitts wrote that ICE had failed to consider the agency’s “obligation under the Fifth Amendment not to subject civil immigration detainees to punitive conditions of confinement.”

The Pablo Sequen case remains active as to a few other constitutional claims relating to the conditions of confinement in the San Francisco holding facility. Similar lawsuits have been filed in other jurisdictions, including Baltimore, Chicago and Minnesota. Plaintiffs in a lawsuit in New York also challenged courthouse arrest policies in that state.

Follow @hillelaron