BIDEN Judge HOBBLES ICE Nationwide!

Hand holding gavel in courtroom setting.

A Biden-appointed judge has stepped in to block deportation officers from arresting illegal immigrants inside immigration courts across the entire country.

Story Snapshot

A Biden judge in California shut down Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in immigration courts nationwide, calling Trump-era rules “arbitrary and capricious.”^[2]
The ruling says courthouse arrests and longer short-term detention scare migrants away from hearings and violate the Administrative Procedure Act, not the immigration statute itself.^[2]^[5]
The order creates a nationwide injunction, even though past Supreme Court decisions have warned judges against blocking federal policy coast to coast.^[6]
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expected to appeal, arguing federal law gives officers broad power to arrest deportable migrants in public places, including courts.^[14]

Biden Judge Halts ICE Arrests In Immigration Courts Across America

A federal judge in San Francisco, P. Casey Pitts, has blocked the Trump administration from allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to arrest illegal immigrants in immigration courts anywhere in the United States.^[3]^[5] Pitts, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, issued a nationwide injunction and vacated the Trump-era policies that expanded courthouse arrests and let officers hold detainees longer in short-term facilities.^[2]^[5] His seventy-plus-page opinion targets how the policy was rolled out, not Congress’s immigration laws themselves.^[2]

Judge Pitts ruled that the Trump-era reversal of earlier limits on courthouse enforcement was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, the 1946 law that demands clear reasons when agencies change major policies.^[1]^[4] He said ICE and the Executive Office for Immigration Review failed to explain why they scrapped older guidance that restricted arrests at courthouses and in immigration court hallways.^[2] In the judge’s view, the agencies did not deal with warnings that these arrests would scare people away from hearings, which he called a “chilling effect.”^[3]^[4]

Claims Of ‘Chilling Effect’ And Due Process Collide With Public Safety Concerns

In his ruling, Pitts accepted arguments from advocacy groups that courthouse arrests make migrants and even witnesses afraid to show up for their hearings.^[3]^[5] He wrote that ICE has been arresting noncitizens based on the same immigration charges that brought them to court in the first place, not unrelated crimes, which he said raises Fifth Amendment concerns about fair treatment.^[1]^[3] Supporters of the lawsuit say this practice turns courthouses into traps instead of places where people can resolve their legal status.^[12]^[22]

Critics of the ruling argue that federal immigration officers already have broad power from Congress to arrest removable noncitizens in public spaces when they have reason to believe the person is deportable.^[14] Legal analyses note that immigration law lets officers rely on records and system checks to form probable cause without a separate criminal warrant.^[14] Courthouses are also not listed as “sensitive locations” like schools or churches in existing Department of Homeland Security guidance, meaning agents have long treated them as lawful enforcement sites.^[14]

Nationwide Injunction Raises Big Questions About Judicial Power

Pitts did more than pause arrests in his own district; he wiped out the Trump policy nationwide.^[2]^[4]^[5] That makes this decision much broader than a recent New York case, where Judge P. Kevin Castel limited his order to three Manhattan immigration court locations after the Department of Justice admitted it had relied on the wrong internal memo to justify certain courthouse arrests.^[5]^[21] In New York, the stay pushed ICE back to its 2021 guidance and applied only in those specific buildings.^[5]^[21]

Legal experts note that the Supreme Court has grown more hostile to nationwide injunctions from a single district judge, especially in immigration cases.^[6] In a 2022 decision about the Migrant Protection Protocols, the Court signaled that lower courts should be cautious about blocking federal immigration policy across all fifty states.^[6] Pitts’s ruling could clash with these trends, giving the Trump administration a strong opening to appeal and ask higher courts to rein in the scope, even if some parts of his reasoning survive.^[6]

Trump Administration Response And What Comes Next For Enforcement

The Trump administration now faces a choice: accept large carve-outs in enforcement or fight Pitts’s order all the way to the Supreme Court.^[3]^[5]^[6] Reporting indicates the administration is likely to appeal first to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the judge focused on paperwork and process while ignoring the clear arrest powers that Congress wrote into law.^[3]^[14] Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have already warned that blocking courthouse arrests makes it easier for criminal aliens to dodge accountability by hiding behind sympathetic venues.

🚨JUST IN🚨

A Biden-appointed judge has just struck down ICE’s 2025 courthouse arrest expansion and 72-hour detention policy nationwide.

Judge Casey Pitts claims ICE & EOIR acted arbitrarily by dropping earlier conclusions that these arrests discourage court appearances,… pic.twitter.com/RRL8YVMaew

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) June 23, 2026

At the same time, civil liberties groups are celebrating the decision and pushing for even broader limits. In Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, earlier lawsuits also won court orders curbing immigration courthouse arrests, though on a smaller scale than Pitts’s nationwide ruling.^[3]^[19] States like Oregon, New York, California, and Illinois have also tried to wall off their courthouses through state rules or laws that demand a judicial warrant before civil immigration arrests.^[19]^[25] Those state-level moves have already drawn protests from ICE, which warns of more fugitives and weaker respect for federal law.^[19]