Federal Judge Blocks ICE Courthouse Arrest Policy

ICE can no longer conduct arrests at immigration courthouses, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

President Donald Trump overturned Biden-era immigration enforcement policies upon his inauguration, allowing immigration agents to arrest individuals while appearing at immigration courthouses for hearings — moves that eventually became a pillar of the administration’s mass deportation plans.

U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts, a Biden appointee, vacated Trump’s executive order and a separate detention waiver that allowed the agency to hold individuals for up to 72 hours, instead of the previous limit of 12 hours.

“For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” Pitts wrote, later arguing the agency’s new policies lacked sound reasoning. “The result of the new policies has thus been to leave ICE agents without any internal guidance or limitations concerning civil arrests at immigration courthouses.”

The class-action lawsuit hinged on plaintiff Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, an asylum-seeker from Guatemala who was arrested by ICE agents as she left a routine hearing at the San Francisco immigration court. She was later detained at a nearby facility.

The ruling was not about ICE’s decisions to arrest noncitizens at immigration courthouses, Pitts wrote, but rather about the agency’s circumvention of the parameters governing its discretion to make such arrests. The agency must return Biden-era regulations, which capped detention at 12 hours and restricted the ability to make arrests at immigration courthouses.

When asked for comment, the Department of Homeland Security referred NOTUS to a post by DHS General Counsel James Percival.

“When a judge sentences a defendant, the defendant is taken into custody,” Percival wrote in response to the ruling. “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.”