A federal judge in California issued an order on Tuesday blocking immigration agents nationwide from making arrests inside immigration courts. The decision halts what had been one of the most aggressive aspects of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Judge P. Casey Pitts of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said in his decision that federal officials had violated a key statute governing federal administrative procedures when they changed previous guidelines that restricted civil arrests inside immigration courthouses.
The judge called federal officials’ decision-making processes “arbitrary and capricious,” saying they failed to consider alternative options and dismissed their own prior concerns that courthouse arrests would “disincentivize” immigrants from attending hearings.
The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit challenging the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is part of the Justice Department, over a surge in immigration-related arrests at courthouses and increasingly long detention of immigrants in ICE facilities intended for brief periods.
Judge Pitts was nominated to the federal bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The courthouse arrests became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s crackdown as people who were showing up for routine hearings and check-ins found themselves suddenly taken into custody in confrontations in courthouse hallways, with masked ICE agents often tangling with people who sought to aid the immigrants.
Last month, a federal judge in Manhattan barred such arrests in immigration courts in New York City, but Tuesday’s ruling by Judge Pitts prohibits such arrests anywhere in the country.
James Percival, the general counsel at the Homeland Security Department, condemned the ruling, arguing that noncitizens ordered deported by an immigration judge should be treated the same as a defendant convicted of a crime.
“A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda,” he wrote on Tuesday in a post on X.
Arrests at the main courthouse in downtown Manhattan had led to daily, highly visible scenes of migrants showing up for routine hearings only to be dragged away and separated from their families by ICE agents patrolling the court hallways.
The federal judge in New York, P. Kevin Castel, issued the ruling in May in response to a lawsuit filed by two immigration advocacy groups, which argued the arrests were unconstitutional and had left migrants scared to attend mandatory hearings out of fear of arrest and deportation.
His ruling applied narrowly to two courthouses in New York City, but it left ICE without a reliable pipeline to easily detain noncitizens in the city with the country’s largest immigrant population.
Since the courthouse arrests began nationwide last year, a stark reversal from past practices, the D.H.S. has argued that the courts were a convenient place for ICE to detain migrants in safer environments without having to deploy agents to local communities.
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