Judge orders halt on ICE courthouse arrests in Northern California

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A federal judge in San Jose has ordered a halt to ICE arrests at courthouses, arguing that immigrants are between a rock and a hard place: They face either getting arrested for trying to follow the law, or are not showing up to court and facing automatic deportation. 

More than 100 courthouse arrests

U.S. District Court Judge Casey Pitts ordered the stay on Christmas Eve, in a limited ruling for the San Francisco region, which includes Concord and Sacramento courts, as well as Central California, Hawai’i, Guam and Saipan. Mission Local has documented about 130 arrests at the San Francisco and Concord immigration courts since May. 

Pitts said that these courthouse arrests give immigrants an untenable choice, which has led to a surge in absenteeism, undermining the integrity of the immigration court system.

Hobson's choice

"This circumstance presents noncitizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms," Pitts wrote in his 38-page ruling. "First, they may appear in immigration court and face likely arrest and detention. Such a "[d]eprivation of physical liberty by detention constitutes irreparable harm."

These arrests violate the asylum seekers' rights under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, Pitts wrote. He also found that ICE's new policy change about allowing these arrests occurred without a reasoned explanation, likely violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which he said has created a severe "chilling" effect on access to justice. 

Pitts' ruling is meant to pause ICE’s policy until there is a final judgment next year. 

The Trump administration has already indicated in court filings that it intends to appeal to the 9th Circuit. 

This summer, ICE officials told KTVU that their agents are allowed to detain immigrants who were wanted, "discreetly to minimize their impact on court proceedings, avoid unnecessarily alarming the public or disrupting court operations."

Asylum seekers arrested at court

Pitts's courthouse arrest ruling was on behalf of Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, an asylum seeker from Guatemala, and Ligia Garcia, an asylum seeker from Colombia, who were arrested after leaving court hearings at San Francisco immigration hearings.

"I fled persecution to seek safety, only to find myself arrested in the courthouse, the one place I was told to trust," Sequen said in a statement following Pitts's ruling. "The terror of that day has haunted me. This decision means I can finally focus on my asylum case, not on the ICE officers who might be waiting for me outside the courtroom door." 

These same asylum seekers filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security overr the allegedly squalid conditions of the ICE holding facilities in San Francisco, where Pitts last month ruled to make ICE remedy the conditions at the Field Office on 630 Sansome Street. 

The asylum seekers are represented by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California, the Central American Resource Center of Northern California, and Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP.

The judge also rejected the Department of Homeland Security's claims that Sequen and Garcia lack standing to challenge the courthouse-arrest policies, and that their claims are unripe and moot. 

History of ICE courthouse arrests

The ruling relies heavily on the testimony of several Bay Area immigration attorneys: Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association; Sean Lai McMahon, senior attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice in Oakland, who regularly serves as "attorney of the day" in Concord immigration court, and former immigration judge Shira Levine, who was fired by the Trump administration earlier this year. 

The ruling recounts some history as regards how ICE agents viewed arresting immigrants at the courthouse as they showed up for their asylum hearings. 

Before this year, ICE conducted civil immigration arrests at courthouses only in "limited" circumstances, the judge noted. 

For example, in 2014, ICE issued internal guidance stating that civil enforcement at courthouses would only occur if the person was a danger to national security or public safety. 

And in 2021, ICE issued guidance that said any arrests at a courthouse may "chill individuals'" legal access and "as a result, impair the fair administration of justice." 

According to the Bay Area attorneys and immigration judge, "it was rare" to see ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers at those courthouses until May 2025.

This changed when President Trump revoked the existing guidance, the ruling notes. 

Pitts wrote that Trump's new guidance to ICE allows courthouse arrests that are "not limited" to those who pose public threats.

Under this new guidance, "ICE officers or agents may conduct civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses" whenever "credible information ... leads them to believe" that the noncitizen they seek to arrest "will be present" at a courthouse, the ruling states.

Pitts wrote that it's OK for agencies to change their existing policies as long as they "provide a reasoned explanation for the change." 

However in this case, Pitts wrote, that didn't happen.

He wrote that the government even acknowledged in previous hearings that these courthouse arrests have not targeted immigrants in "high-priority groups," and that the increased arrests have coincided with "a significant increase in the number of individuals not appearing for their hearings."

Violation of due process

Pitts found that the change in policy likely violated due process by detaining people who had already been released by the government "without first making an individualized determination that the individual’s material circumstances had changed, such that they posed a flight or security risk."

According to McMahon, Atkinson and Levine, before May, at least two-thirds of immigrants scheduled for removal hearings usually appeared for the court dates.

But since May, "it is common to have a docket where only 1–2 unrepresented individuals appear at a docket of 20–30 scheduled Respondents and the vast majority of the Respondents are ordered removed in absentia," the ruling notes.

And on one day in court, no one showed up because the immigrants told their lawyers that they "are afraid to go to court."