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A federal judge has granted a stay on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests at Bay Area courthouses.
District Judge Casey Pitts issued the order last week after hearing a class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in September. The stay means that ICE will not be able to make arrests outside courthouses that fall under ICE’s San Francisco area of responsibility, which includes Northern California, Hawaii, Guam and Saipan.
The plaintiffs were 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 law firm Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP. The suit sought a nationwide stay on ICE arrests outside courthouses.
After President Donald Trump’s administration took office in January 2025, ICE and the Executive Office for Immigration Review – a sub-agency of the Department of Justice that oversees immigration removal proceedings – revised their policies to permit arrests of noncitizens at courthouses where they are required to appear for hearings and immigration check-ins.
The ICE arrests outside courthouses represented a departure from the decades-long bipartisan agreement that courthouses were sensitive locations. The ruling also quoted immigration attorneys and judges who said that ICE arrests were rare outside Bay Area courthouses.
However, after the change in policy, ICE officers started conducting arrests outside courthouses across the country, said Nisha Kashyap, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights who worked with the plaintiffs.
“In late May, all of a sudden, we began to see ICE agents appearing in the immigration courts and arresting people after their immigration hearings, which is unprecedented in the experience of not just the attorneys who represent people in the court, but also the immigration judges who’ve been working in that building for a long time,” Kashyap said. “I cannot stress enough how unprecedented the enactment of this policy was.”
Kashyap said that at least 80 noncitizens were arrested by ICE outside courthouses in the Bay Area between May and September, and that the number is likely an undercount because of the lack of reliable data. She added that the arrests were not restricted to individuals who had removal orders issued against them but also included people attending routine hearings in their immigration cases.
In his ruling, Pitts found that ICE and the Executive Office of Immigration Review policy change was made without a reasoned explanation and has had a chilling effect on noncitizens’ participation in their court proceedings.
“In sum, nothing in ICE’s courthouse-arrest policies or the case law identified by the government explains the lack of a logical connection between ICE’s rationales and its expansion of civil arrests at immigration courthouses,” the order states.
The possibility of being arrested by ICE at court hearings, he wrote in his ruling, forces noncitizens appearing in court to choose between “two irreparable harms”. They might skip their court appearance to evade arrest by ICE, but that would have a detrimental impact on their immigration case, putting their future in the United States at risk.
“I fled persecution to seek safety, only to find myself arrested in the courthouse, the one place I was told to trust,” said Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, a plaintiff who was arrested by ICE after her appearance in the San Francisco immigration court on July 31. “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.”
Pitts also noted that the change in ICE’s policy regarding courthouse arrests was likely in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal statute that governs the establishment of fair administrative procedures by federal agencies.
While the plaintiffs sought a stay on courthouse arrests nationwide, Pitts limited the stay to the jurisdiction of ICE’s San Francisco Area of Responsibility, referring to the recent Supreme Court decision that limited the District Court’s authority to issue nationwide stays.
– Story by Tanay Gokhale, Bay City News Service
