A federal judge in San Francisco late Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction blocking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from making arrests at immigration courthouses, dealing a significant blow to the Trump administration's enforcement tactics.
U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts, a Biden appointee, ruled that ICE's 2025 policy allowing such arrests was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedures Act. Pitts highlighted that the agency itself had flip-flopped on where arrests were permissible, undermining any claim of reasoned decision-making.
“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 in his opinion.
The ruling expands on a prior New York case that barred arrests at two immigration courthouses in that state. Pitts's order is the first to apply nationwide, covering all immigration court facilities under the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
The case took a notable turn when Department of Justice attorneys admitted to a factual error in the New York litigation, conceding that ICE's 2025 policy “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near EOIR immigration courts.” Pitts referenced this debacle, noting the government spent over six months arguing the policy represented an intentional expansion of arrests at immigration courthouses, only to have that argument unravel.
“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,” Pitts wrote.
The judge also criticized ICE for failing to consider the chilling effect on migrants' attendance at court proceedings, a factor central to the Biden-era guidance that had barred such arrests. Under the previous administration, ICE prohibited civil enforcement near all courthouses to protect access to justice.
“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 added.
The ruling comes amid broader legal battles over immigration enforcement. In a related case, a similar challenge to a Trump-era policy on voter data access was blocked by a federal court, highlighting ongoing judicial scrutiny of administration actions. The decision also follows a separate ruling that permanently blocked a Trump order requiring citizenship proof for voting, underscoring a pattern of court interventions.
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,” he wrote. “A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”
The ruling is likely to be appealed, setting up a potential showdown in higher courts over the scope of ICE's authority at immigration courthouses.
