Federal judge blocks migrant arrests at immigration courts nationwide

A federal judge late Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from making arrests at immigration courthouses, barring the practice nationwide.

The ruling from San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) allowance of arrests at immigration courthouses was arbitrary and capricious — noting that the agency itself had waffled on what locations arrests were permitted.

“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.

A related case in New York has previously barred immigration courthouse arrests at two locations in that state, but Pitt’s ruling is the first to apply nationwide.

In the New York case, a DOJ attorney informed the court it had made a “factual error” in asserting ICE’s 2025 policy applied to immigration courthouses, with the prosecutor telling the judge the policy “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review (‘EOIR’) immigration courts.”

Pitts, an........

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