A federal judge in Chicago has imposed new limitations on the ability of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to make arrests without warrants, siding with plaintiffs in a long-running class-action lawsuit against ICE.
The ruling, which stems from a consent decree struck by the Biden administration in 2022, is unrelated to the pending legal challenges to President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard troops in Chicago and Portland, Ore. But it signals that another judge is skeptical about the Trump administration’s willingness to adhere to legal requirements as the president ratchets up his mass deportations.
The decision, issued on Tuesday, is confined to Chicago and will expire in February, but it could influence the courts’ interpretations of ICE’S legal authorities in similar cases elsewhere.
The 52-page ruling from Magistrate Judge Jeffrey I. Cummings challenges the legal basis for one of ICE’S tools for making arrests — blank warrants that are often filled out by officers in the field. Under Tuesday’s order, those forms can be used only as a basis to arrest someone who has already received a notice to appear before an immigration judge.
That change alone sharply limits ICE’S authority to make “collateral arrests” of unknown individuals who officers encounter in the field, unless the agents have probable cause to believe those people are likely to escape before a warrant can be issued.
“If ICE can’t arrest them without a warrant, that really limits the use of racial profiling,” said Mark Fleming, a lawyer at the National Immigrant Justice Center, which represented the plaintiffs.
Judge Cummings highlighted the importance of probable cause after a recent Supreme Court interim ruling that allowed immigration authorities to continue to stop people and question them based on factors like their ethnicity.
“Citizens, non-citizens with legal status, and foreign nationals are interwoven throughout ICE’S Chicago Area of Responsibility and American society in general,” Judge Cummings wrote. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, he wrote, U.S. citizens and legal residents could now be questioned or detained for sharing “commonalities” like ethnicity and language with “Latino foreign nationals.”
That, he said, heightens the need for ICE agents to show probable cause.
Mr. Fleming praised the decision. “We’re seeing more people who have deep community ties — families, loved ones, people with jobs, some of them U.S. citizens — being taken into ICE custody,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The order focuses on the arrest of 22 individuals. Eleven of them were working at a restaurant in Liberty, Mo., when ICE took them into custody on Feb. 7, less than a month after Mr. Trump returned to office.
Judge Cummings found that ICE did not have reason to believe that the individuals were “reasonably likely” to escape before the agency could obtain a warrant, in violation of a consent agreement that the agency had entered into in 2022, when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office.
In the agreement, ICE denied the plaintiffs’ allegations and did not admit to any wrongdoing by its officers.
According to the plaintiffs, another 11 people were arrested in violation of the agreement in the Chicago area and were taken into custody by ICE.
Rather than extend the 2022 agreement for another three years, as the plaintiffs had asked, Judge Cummings extended it by 118 days. None of the 22 arrestees are still in custody, but the order requires ICE to “lift any imposed conditions” of their release. The court also required ICE to again send out a policy statement explaining the legal requirements to make an arrest to all ICE officers nationwide.
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