A federal judge in California has blocked several Trump administration immigration policies nationwide, including a rule that permitted arrests inside immigration courts and another that removed limits on how long people accused of immigration violations could be held in custody.
U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California concluded in a 71-page opinion issued Tuesday that the policies were arbitrary and ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act. Pitts wrote that lawyers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review “failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions.”
The courthouse arrest policy originated under the Trump administration, allowing federal agents to detain people as they appeared for proceedings before immigration judges.
Community advocates and Democratic lawmakers have sharply criticized the practice, which has produced dramatic confrontations in courthouse corridors. Opponents argue that the methods used by federal immigration officers have frightened families and deeply unsettled immigrant communities.
Pitts wrote 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.”
According to Pitts, the policy rests on “a false premise” that ICE had lawfully withdrawn 2021 guidance governing arrests at immigration courthouses, and it “fails to provide a rational explanation” for ending earlier restrictions on civil immigration enforcement actions in court settings.
Pitts also found that the detention waiver, which permitted ICE to keep detainees for longer than 12 hours, violated detainees’ Fifth Amendment rights because they were exposed to “punitive conditions of confinement.”
The judge noted that ICE had held some people at an immigration facility in San Francisco beyond 12 hours, sometimes overnight and in other cases for several days. He invalidated the policy after finding that ICE “failed to consider alternative options to address its capacity issues,” the operational problem that prompted the agency to adopt the measure.
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“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.”
