Immigration courthouse-arrest policies voided by federal judge

The Trump admin's policies expanding ICE arrests inside immigration courthouses were "arbitrary and capricious," a judge found.

ICE badges (Photo by Jim Watson - Pool/Getty Images)

A federal judge nullified the Trump administration’s “arbitrary and capricious” policy changes radically expanding arrests inside immigration courthouses, finding that the government failed to act in compliance with federal law.

“For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts, a Biden appointee, wrote in a 71-page ruling. “That instruction—codified in the Administrative Procedures Act—does not require an agency to make the choice that a reviewing court might deem preferable. But it demands that an agency at least provide sound reasons for following its chosen course.”

For several years, guidance from Immigration and Customs Enforcement restricted the circumstances and the situations in which federal agents could conduct arrests inside immigration courthouses.

In 2014 and 2015, internal ICE guidance limited such arrests to targets “suspected of terrorism or espionage,” those who “participated in organized criminal gangs,” or cases involving some other “serious risk to public safety.” A subsequent revision of the policy three years later stressed that those arrests required “special circumstances.”

A Biden-era revision emphasized the risk that arresting immigrants inside immigration courthouses could “chill individuals’ access to courthouses and, as a result, impair the fair administration of justice.”

The Trump administration largely scrapped those guardrails almost immediately, first with an interim guidance and then with a final version.

“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.”

The judge’s ruling, issued in response to a class action lawsuit by noncitizens led by a San Francisco asylum-seeker, does not prohibit courthouse arrests altogether. It restores the restrictions that existed concerning such arrests before the Trump adminstration’s arbitrary changes.

In May, a separate ruling in New York set aside a separate policy authorizing ICE arrests inside immigration courts in that state. The California ruling relates to immigration courthouses nationwide.

Read the ruling in full here.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify that the ruling applies to guidance specifically related to immigration courthouses.