Federal judge blocks ICE from arresting immigrants in Northern California courts

A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Justice Department counterparts from “sweeping” immigration detentions across Northern California, prompting an appeals challenge to one of the Trump administration’s most controversial tactics.

“This case presents noncitizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable dangers,” wrote Judge P. Casey Pitts in his Christmas Eve ruling.

“First, they may appear in immigration court and face arrest and jail time,” the judge wrote. “Alternatively, noncitizens may choose not to appear and instead forfeit their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief from removal.”

Wednesday’s decision bars ICE and the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review from ambushing asylum seekers and other noncitizens at routine hearings across the state — a move that would effectively restore a pre-Trump ban on such detentions.

“Here, ICE and EOIR before “The policies governing the detention of people in courts and detention in detention centers provide a standard,” said the judge.

Authorities have long barred arrests in “critical areas”—such as hospitals, houses of worship and schools—making them inaccessible to most immigration authorities.

The designation was first established decades ago under ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Services. ICE held the ban when the agency was established after the September 11 attacks.

Courts were added to the list under President Obama. The policy barring multiple arrests in court was suspended during the Trump administration and reinstated by President Biden.

An internal ICE directive from the Biden era found “[e]conducting extradition proceedings in or near a court may reduce people’s access to the courts and, as a result, impede the proper administration of justice.”

However, the agency’s court order was revoked earlier this year, leading to an increase in the number of arrests, and a dramatic drop in court appearances, court records say.

Many invisibles were ordered to be removed in their absence.

Monthly removals from furlough orders more than doubled this year, to 4,177 from less than 1,600 by 2024, justice department data show.

More than 50,000 asylum seekers have been ordered removed after failing to appear in court since January – more than have been ordered removed in absentia in the past five years combined.

“ICE cannot choose to ignore the ‘costs’ of its new policies – it silences the participation of non-citizens in their removal proceedings – and only consider policies that are ‘targeted’ for the ‘benefits’ of immigration enforcement,” Pitts wrote in his op-ed.

That decision could put the San Francisco case on a collision course with other lawsuits that seek to limit ICE access to areas that have been deemed illegal. The case was brought by a group of asylum seekers who posed a risk and were arrested when they appeared in court.

One, a 24-year-old Guatemalan asylum seeker named Yulisa Alvarado Ambrocio, was spared custody because her 11-month-old breastfed child was with her in court, records show. Attorneys for the administration told the court that ICE will almost certainly pick him up at his next hearing.

An arrest of this nature seems unreasonable and unreasonable, and it is unlikely that it will continue to be considered by the courts, said Judge Pitts on Wednesday.

“That widespread detention in immigration courts would have a negative impact on non-citizen attendance at removal hearings (as common sense, prior guidance, and actual experience in immigration court as of May 2025 makes clear) and thereby undermine this primary objective is a ‘significant element of the problem’ that ICE needed, but failed, to consider,” Pitts said.

A district judge in Manhattan issued a dissenting ruling in a similar case this fall, setting up a possible split in the district and a Supreme Court challenge to the incarceration in the courts in 2026.

For now, the Christmas Eve ruling applies only to ICE’s San Francisco Area of ​​Responsibility, a region that includes all of Northern and Central California, as far south as Bakersfield.

The statewide restriction comes in the wake of an emergency Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that stripped district judges of the power to block federal policies except in narrowly-designed circumstances.

The administration told the court they intend to appeal to the 9th Circuit, where Trump-appointed judges have thrown the bench to the right of its longstanding liberal reputation.