A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from carrying out immigration arrests at immigration courthouses, issuing a nationwide ruling that marks a significant setback for the administration’s enforcement efforts.
Late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts, based in San Francisco, ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s policy allowing arrests at immigration courthouses was “arbitrary and capricious,” finding that the agency failed to adequately justify the change and appeared inconsistent in explaining where such arrests were permitted.
In his ruling, Pitts argued that ICE’s actions reflected not merely flawed decision-making, but what he described as an absence of meaningful decision-making altogether.
“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,” Pitts wrote.
The decision is the first nationwide order prohibiting arrests at immigration courthouses. A separate case in New York had previously restricted the practice at two locations in that state, but Pitts’s ruling extends the prohibition across the country.
The judge also pointed to confusion surrounding the administration’s legal defense of the policy. In the New York case, a Department of Justice attorney informed the court that the government had made what was described as a “factual error” when it argued that ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policy applied to immigration courts. According to that filing, the policy “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review immigration courts.”
Pitts referenced that reversal in his own opinion, suggesting it undermined the government’s position.
“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. The argument was unconvincing,” he wrote.
The judge further noted that ICE itself appeared to have operated under the assumption for more than a year that the policy did apply to immigration courthouses, only later recognizing the broader impact of its actions.
According to Pitts, neither the policy language nor the administrative record demonstrated that ICE understood it was removing previous limitations on enforcement activity at immigration courthouses without replacing them with new guidance.
The ruling concluded that the policy violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires federal agencies to carefully evaluate and justify significant policy changes before implementing them.
Under the Biden administration, ICE had prohibited civil immigration enforcement near all courthouses, citing concerns that arrests could discourage individuals from attending court proceedings and interfere with the administration of justice.
Pitts said ICE failed to adequately address those concerns when it altered its approach under President Trump.
“The policies entirely fail to address the chilling effect of courthouse arrests on noncitizens’ attendance at court proceedings,” the judge wrote.
During the Trump administration, ICE resumed courthouse arrests and expanded enforcement efforts to immigration courts, where asylum seekers and others with pending immigration matters are required to appear.
The ruling also comes after agency prosecutors began voluntarily dismissing some immigration cases. Migrants often interpreted those dismissals as a sign that removal proceedings had ended, but once cases were no longer active, agents could arrest individuals as they exited the courthouse.
The administration quickly pushed back against the ruling. James Percival, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, sharply criticized the decision on social media.
“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 wrote. He called the ruling “naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”
The dispute highlights the ongoing clash between immigration enforcement priorities and judicial oversight, as courts continue to scrutinize how far federal authorities can go in pursuing enforcement actions while ensuring access to legal proceedings.
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