A federal judge in California has issued a ruling banning Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from making arrests inside immigration courts nationwide, blocking one of the Trump administration’s strategies for carrying out mass deportations.
When the Trump administration began its crackdown on illegal immigration last year, ICE reversed its previous policy against making arrests in or near immigration courthouses.
As a result, many people accused of being in the country illegally have been detained and separated from their families when they show up for routine hearings and check-ins at courthouses.
Immigration attorneys have spoken out against the practice, saying it punishes people who are trying to comply with the rules and turns the justice system into a place of fear. The Department of Homeland Security has argued that courts are a safe and convenient place to detain people who are in the country illegally.
On Tuesday, Judge P. Casey Pitts, with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued a 71-page ruling calling the practice “arbitrary and capricious” and saying that it onflicted with prior concerns ICE had raised about the the negative effect courthouse arrests have on attendance rates. Pitts was nominated to the federal bench by President Biden.
“The policies entirely fail to address the chilling effect of courthouse arrests on noncitizens’ attendance at court proceedings, which is both a critical factor underlying ICE’s 2021 guidance and an ‘important aspect of the problem’ in its own right,” Pitts wrote.
James Percival, the general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, decried the ruling in a statement on X, calling it “naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”
“When a judge sentences a defendant, the defendant is taken into custody,” Percival wrote. “If an alien is ordered removed by an immigration judge, the same should happen.”
The ruling was issued as part of a class-action lawsuit filed by noncitizens challenging ICE’s recent practices of making arrests at immigration courthouses and detaining people for extended periods in facilities designed for short-term holds.
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