In a first-in-the-nation ruling on a hotly contested Trump administration policy, a federal judge ordered a halt Wednesday to arrests of migrants at immigration courthouses in Northern California, saying the detentions are unjustified and have discouraged people from attending critical hearings.
“Widespread” arrests at the courthouse are having a “chilling effect on noncitizens’ participation in removal proceedings” and their ability to contest deportation, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of San Jose wrote in an order blocking further arrests.
He said administration officials had offered no “reasoned explanation” for their policy, and no evidence for their claim that courthouse arrests protect the public from dangerous people.
Instead, Pitts said, the immigrants have faced “a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms. First, they may appear in immigration court and face likely arrest and detention.” Or, they “may choose not to appear and instead to forego their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief.”
Citing the Supreme Court's recent ruling barring federal judges from issuing nationwide injunctions, Pitts limited his order to courthouses in the jurisdiction of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s San Francisco headquarters. Those include courthouses in San Francisco, Sacramento and Concord, said an attorney in the case, Jordan Wells of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
He said there have been more than 100 arrests at those courthouses under the Trump administration policy, and several thousand arrests nationwide.
“People who show up for court expecting to go home at the end of the day shouldn’t have to choose between pursuing their case in immigration court or risking arrest and giving up hope of pursuing the American dream,” Wells said after the ruling.
And it remains possible that Pitts will extend his ruling nationwide at a later stage of the case, because the Supreme Court did not decide whether its limits applied to the type of law he was considering. The Trump administration could appeal such a decision and ultimately return the issue to the nation’s high court.
The courthouse arrests are part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to massively increase deportations, including a shutdown of the Mexican border to asylum-seekers, a goal of arresting at least 3,000 immigrants per day, and denials of hearings to undocumented immigrants arrested anywhere in the United States.
Pitts, appointed by President Joe Biden, said the courthouse arrests were a substantial departure from past practices.
Under President Barack Obama, the judge said, ICE had a policy of arresting only immigrants who posed a serious risk to public safety or national security. The agency expanded that policy after Trump first took office in 2017, but targeted immigrants who had been convicted of crimes or were gang members, and told its agents to refrain from making arrests at immigration courthouses, Pitts said.
Biden returned to the previous policy after taking office in 2021. But Trump’s current administration, in an order issued in its current form in July, authorized ICE officers to make arrests “whenever ‘credible information… leads them to believe’ that the noncitizen they seek to arrest ‘will be present at a courthouse,’” Pitts said, quoting language in the order.
He said immigration attorneys testified that, as a result, most immigrants have stopped showing up for hearings, and are ordered to be deported in proceedings they did not attend.