A federal judge, appointed by former President Joe Biden, is blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from arresting illegal aliens at courthouses, a practice considered by law enforcement to be the safest way to apprehend those eligible for deportation.
On Tuesday, Judge P. Casey Pitts, appointed to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California by Biden in 2023, issued an order that will halt ICE’s ability to broadly arrest illegal aliens at courthouses across the United States.
“Because the record before the Court demonstrates that ICE … failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions, the Court concludes that each of the challenged policies is arbitrary and capricious in contravention of the Administrative Procedure Act,” Pitts wrote.
Pitts argued that preventing ICE agents from arresting illegal aliens at courthouses would not prevent the agency from arresting some illegal aliens at courthouses so long as they fall under “defined circumstances.”
“Were it true that vacatur of the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies would be hugely disruptive, as the government insists, surely the government could point to some evidence of disruption resulting from the suspension of those policies within ICE’s San Francisco area of responsibility since December 2025 or to evidence of disruption during the time period that the prior policies were in place. It has not done so,” Pitts writes.
The courthouse policy, according to experts, was vital to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, as arresting illegal aliens in the confines of a courthouse typically is the safest way for ICE agents to conduct such immigration enforcement.
“When a judge sentences a defendant, the defendant is taken into custody. If an alien is ordered removed by an immigration judge, the same should happen,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) General Counsel James Percival wrote in a statement. “A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”
Pitts’ ruling also prevents ICE from holding illegal aliens in short-term custody for up to 72 hours, requiring that such individuals cannot be held for longer than 12 hours.
The case is Pablo Sequen v. Albarran, No. 25-cv-06487-PCP in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.
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