US judge vacates ICE courthouse arrest policies

A federal judge in California on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration’s policy of making arrests at immigration courts.

In a 71-page ruling, US District Judge P. Casey Pitts concluded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) “failed to provide reasoned explanations” for their actions.

Pitts called federal officials’ decision-making processes “arbitrary and capricious.”

“For the avoidance of doubt, simply extending the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies to cover immigration courthouses would not cure those policies’ fatal defects. As the Court has previously detailed, 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 wrote.

The ruling represents a significant setback for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts, which had relied in part on loosening restrictions on ICE enforcement practices. Those policy changes contributed to a sharp increase in courthouse arrests, where individuals attending immigration hearings—often while seeking lawful status—were taken into custody.