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A US judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked two federal agencies from arresting noncitizens at immigration courthouses in the San Francisco area, a ruling hailed by migrant justice advocates amid ongoing legal challenges to the Trump administration’s policy.
US District Judge for the Northern District of California Casey Pitts granted a stay in Sequen v. Albarran blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) from carrying out courthouse arrests within ICE’s San Francisco Area of Responsibility, pending the outcome of a broader legal challenge.
“Plaintiffs have established a likelihood that members of the courthouse-arrest class will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of a stay,” Pitts, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote in his 38-page ruling. “ICE has arrested large numbers of noncitizens at immigration courthouses in northern California pursuant to the challenged courthouse arrest policies, and it avows that it will continue doing so.”
For decades, federal immigration authorities eschewed arrests at “sensitive locations,” including places of worship, hospitals, schools, and — during the Obama and Biden administrations — immigration courts. Trump began targeting courthouses during his first term.
“This circumstance presents noncitizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms,” Pitts wrote in his decision. “First, they may appear in immigration court and face likely arrest and detention… And for many class members whom ICE arrests under the challenged policies… such an arrest would likely violate their rights under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.”
“Alternatively, noncitizens may choose not to appear and instead to forego their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief from removal,” Pitts wrote. “As the declarations of immigration attorneys and former immigration judges establish, dozens of noncitizens are already taking this path and receiving in absentia removal orders as a result.”
“Accordingly, if noncitizens wish to avoid the irreparable harm of arrest and detention, they must instead irrevocably give up their pursuit of potentially valid immigration claims and be ordered removed,” he noted. “There can be little question that this permanent loss of noncitizen’s opportunity to have their claims heard, and their resulting removal, is an irreparable injury.”
Pitts found that the class plaintiffs “are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims” that the Trump administration’s ICE and EOIR courthouse arrest policy is “arbitrary and capricious.”
Wednesday’s decision follows a November 25 preliminary injunction in the same case requiring ICE to remedy unconstitutionally unsafe conditions in temporary holding cells at the agency’s San Francisco field office.
Responding to Wednesday’s ruling, class plaintiff Carmen Pablo Sequen said: “I fled persecution to seek safety, only to find myself arrested in the courthouse, the one place I was told to trust. 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.”
Plaintiffs’ lawyer Jordan Wells, a senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement that “the administration’s reckless policy is an affront to justice, designed to sabotage the immigration court system and force people to abandon their lawful claims.”
“This ruling is a critical step in ensuring that immigrants can safely pursue their immigration cases without fear of arrest,” Wells added.
Laura Sanchez, legal director at the Central American Resource Center of Northern California, said, “For our clients, who are asylum seekers, survivors of violence, parents fighting to stay with their children, this ruling begins to lift a cloud of terror.”
“They can now walk into court, not as targets, but as people lawfully pursuing their cases,” Sanchez added. “This stay is a profound affirmation of their humanity and their right to be heard.”
In a separate case, Pitts earlier this week issued a 67-page order in Garro Pinchi v. Noem blocking the Trump administration’s rearrest and redetention policy targeting noncitizens who had previously been released and later taken into custody after attending immigration court hearings or check-ins.
Other courts have ruled against the arrest of noncitizens at immigration courthouses, including in a 2019 preliminary injunction granted by District Court Judge Indira Talwani — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — blocking ICE “from civilly arresting parties, witnesses, and others attending Massachusetts courthouses on official business while they are going to, attending, or leaving the courthouse.”
A federal appellate court reversed Talwani’s preliminary injunction in the case, which did not result in any final judgment for or against ICE’s courthouse arrest policy, as plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit as moot after the Biden administration ended such apprehensions.
Earlier this month, US District Judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell — an Obama appointee — issued a ruling in Escobar Molina v. US Department of Homeland Security that preliminarily blocked warrantless civil immigration arrests by DHS officers in Washington, DC absent probable cause.
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