A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Justice Department counterpart from “sweeping” civil arrests in immigration courts across Northern California, filing an appeal challenge to one of the Trump administration’s most controversial deportation tactics.
“This circumstance presents non-citizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms,” wrote Judge P. Casey Pitts in his Christmas Eve decision.
“First, they may appear in immigration court and face possible arrest and detention,” the judge wrote. “Alternatively, non-citizens may choose not to appear and instead waive their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief from removal.”
Wednesday’s ruling blocks ICE and the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review from holding asylum seekers and other noncitizens at routine hearings across the region — a move that would effectively restore a pre-Trump ban on such arrests.
“Here, ICE and EOIR’s earlier the policies governing court arrests and detention in holding facilities provide a standard,” the judge said.
Authorities have been cracking down on arrests in “sensitive places”—such as hospitals, houses of worship and schools—putting them away from most civilian immigration enforcement.
The designation was first established decades ago under ICE’s predecessor agency, Immigration and Naturalization Services. ICE absorbed the bans when the agency was formed after the September 11 attacks.
The courts were added to the list under President Obama. The policy banning most in-court arrests was suspended during the first Trump administration and reinstated by President Biden.
Internal ICE guide from Biden era found “[e]The enforcement of civil immigration enforcement actions in or near court may chill individuals’ access to court and, as a result, impede the fair administration of justice.”
However, the agency’s court policy backfired earlier this year, leading to an increase in arrests, and a shocking drop in court appearances, court records show.
Most of those who do not appear are ordered to be removed in absentia.
Monthly removal orders in absentia more than doubled this year, to 4,177 from less than 1,600 in 2024, justice department data show.
More than 50,000 asylum seekers have been ordered removed after failing to appear at court hearings since January — more than those ordered removed in absentia in the previous five years combined.
“ICE cannot choose to ignore the ‘costs’ of its new policies—chilling the participation of noncitizens in their removal proceedings—and consider only the purported ‘benefits’ of the policies to immigration enforcement,” Pitts wrote in his stay order.
That decision likely sets the San Francisco case on a collision course with other lawsuits that seek to curb ICE incursions into spaces previously considered off-limits. This case was brought by a group of people seeking asylum who faced the risk and were detained when they appeared in court.
One, a 24-year-old Guatemalan asylum seeker named Yulisa Alvarado Ambrocio, was released from detention only because her 11-month-old son was breastfeeding with her in court, records show. Administration lawyers told the court that ICE will almost certainly bring it up at its next hearing.
Judge Pitts ruled Wednesday, these arrests appear arbitrary and capricious, and are unlikely to survive the scrutiny of the courts.
“That widespread civil arrests in immigration courts could have a chilling effect on the attendance of noncitizens in removal proceedings (as common sense, prior guidance, and current experience in immigration court as of May 2025 make clear) and thereby undermine this central purpose is thus an ‘important aspect of the problem’ that ICE needed, but failed to consider,”
A district judge in Manhattan reversed a similar case this fall, setting up a possible circuit split and even a Supreme Court challenge to the arrests in court in 2026.
For now, the Christmas Eve decision applies only to ICE’s San Francisco Area of Responsibility, a region that includes all of Northern and Central California, south to Bakersfield.
The geographic limit comes in response to the Supreme Court’s emergency ruling earlier this year that stripped district judges of the power to block federal policies outside narrowly drawn circumstances.
The administration told the court it intends to appeal to the 9th Circuit, where Trump-appointed judges have pushed the bench far to the right of its longtime liberal reputation.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.