Judge Vacates Trump Policy Allowing Arrests At Immigration Courts

A federal judge on Tuesday vacated the Trump administration’s policies allowing immigration agents to arrest non-U.S. citizens at immigration courthouses around the country, saying the Department of Justice failed to provide “reasoned explanations” for the policies.

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts, a Biden appointee, ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents can no longer detain noncitizens at immigration courts after the Trump administration implemented new policies via executive order last year that drastically increased the number of courthouse arrests.

The ruling strikes a major blow to the president’s mass deportation campaign, which was facilitated in part by the removal of certain limitations on ICE’s enforcement tactics. Those changes have led to a sharp rise in arrests at immigration courthouses, where people facing deportation attend proceedings, often pursuing lawful status.

Pitts called the policies “arbitrary and capricious,” adding that new guidelines implemented when Trump took office last year failed to consider the impacts of arresting noncitizens seeking legal status in immigration court.

“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 decisionmaking but a complete lack of decisionmaking,” he wrote.

Pitts had temporarily halted the Trump administration from making arrests at courthouses in the Northern District of California, including the San Francisco area, earlier this year.

DOJ had asked the judge to narrowly tailor any decision to apply only to the San Francisco area, arguing its law enforcement operations would be negatively impacted if ICE were prevented from making arrests at immigration courts nationwide.

“It is far from obvious that vacating the courthouse-arrest policies will significantly hinder ICE’s operations,” Pitts wrote in Tuesday’s denial of that request.

Department of Homeland Security general counsel James Percival decried the ruling as harmful to the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.

“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,” Percival said in a statement. “A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The ruling marks the Trump administration’s second loss on the issue of courthouse arrests in as many months. A federal judge in New York barred immigration agents from making arrests at immigration courts in New York last month.

The arrests at immigration courts in New York sparked headline-grabbing protests last year. More than a dozen Democratic elected officials were arrested as part of a protest inside a building that houses an immigration court in the city.

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.