San Francisco judge blocks courthouse immigration arrests nationwide
A San Francisco federal judge barred courthouse immigration arrests nationwide, saying the policy scared people away from hearings and lacked any reasoned explanation.
U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California issued a 71-page decision Tuesday, June 23, 2026, blocking immigration arrests at courthouses nationwide.
The ruling vacated Trump administration policies that expanded civil immigration arrests at courthouses and allowed short-term detention in ICE holding cells for up to 72 hours. It reinstated earlier Biden-era limits that narrowed courthouse arrests to limited circumstances and capped detention in short-term facilities at 12 hours.
The lawsuit was brought by Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, an asylum seeker arrested after leaving a routine hearing at the San Francisco immigration court. Pitts found the administration’s policy shift was “arbitrary and capricious,” cited a “complete lack of decision-making,” and faulted officials for failing to give “reasoned explanations” under the Administrative Procedure Act, the 1946 law that requires agencies to justify their actions.
Pitts found the government failed to confront the “chilling effect” courthouse arrests were having on attendance.
In May 2026, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in New York barred most such arrests in three Manhattan immigration courts, including at 26 Federal Plaza and the Javits Federal Building. Castel’s order was limited to New York; Pitts’s ruling applies nationwide. Before Trump returned to office in January 2025, ICE policy from 2014 through 2021 limited courthouse arrests to high-risk cases, and a 2021 restriction narrowed that further to national-security threats or immediate risks of destroying evidence.
James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, called the San Francisco ruling “judicial activism.” Nisha Kashyap, a lawyer with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, called it “tremendously significant.”
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