A federal judge in San Francisco late Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction blocking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making arrests at immigration courthouses, handing a significant legal setback to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement push.
U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts, a Biden appointee, ruled that ICE’s 2025 policy permitting courthouse arrests was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires federal agencies to demonstrate thorough evaluation before changing existing policy.
“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 decision.
The ruling extends far beyond a previous New York case that had barred ICE arrests at two immigration court locations in that state. Pitts’ order applies across all immigration courts in the country.
James Percival, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, pushed back sharply. “When a judge sentences a defendant, the defendant is taken into custody,” Percival wrote on X. “If an alien is ordered removed by an immigration judge, the same should happen. A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”
The ruling revives, in effect, the enforcement posture established under the Biden administration, which had barred ICE from making civil immigration arrests near any courthouse. Biden officials argued at the time that courthouse arrests “chill” immigrants’ willingness to appear in court and “impair the fair administration of justice.”
The Trump administration reversed that policy in 2025, directing ICE to resume courthouse operations including at immigration courts where asylum seekers and others with pending matters are required to appear.
The case exposed an embarrassing internal inconsistency in the government’s legal defense. During a parallel proceeding in New York, a Department of Justice attorney told the court the administration had made a “factual error” in previously claiming the 2025 policy applied to immigration courthouses, asserting that the policy “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions” at those locations.
Pitts cited the admission directly. “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,” he wrote.
ICE had also moved to voluntarily dismiss some deportation cases in immigration courts last year, a tactic that left migrants without active proceedings but legally vulnerable to arrest once they departed the courthouse without an open case file.
The Justice Department is expected to appeal the ruling. The administration has faced a string of federal court orders limiting its immigration enforcement strategies since taking office in January 2025.
