ICE arrested immigrants at Northern California immigration courthouses for most of 2025 without lawful authority, a federal judge found

On December 24, 2025, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a temporary order barring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making civil arrests at immigration courts across its San Francisco Area of Responsibility, which spans Northern and Central California, Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan. The suit was brought by Bay Area immigration advocates, including the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, challenging a January 2025 nationwide ICE and DOJ Executive Office for Immigration Review policy that reversed decades of guidance treating courthouses as places generally protected from civil immigration arrests. Pitts found the reversal "arbitrary and capricious," concluding the administration had failed to provide the reasoned explanation federal administrative law requires for abandoning the prior practice, despite evidence the change would deter immigrants from attending their own hearings.

An October 2025 court filing by the plaintiffs documented at least 75 immigration-court arrests in San Francisco and at least 39 in Sacramento during 2025, with an unknown additional number at the Concord immigration court. Pitts found the arrests produced a chilling effect on court attendance, contributing to a rise in missed hearings and resulting in-absentia deportation orders, and undermined the adjudicatory system those hearings are meant to operate within. ICE has defended the January 2025 directive as legal "operational guidance," and neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to a request for comment on the ruling.

One case illustrates the practice's stakes: asylum-seeker Jorge Willy Valera Chuquillanqui was arrested by ICE agents immediately after his July 25, 2025 hearing at the San Francisco immigration court and held for three days in a roughly 200-square-foot holding cell above the courtroom with seven other detainees, without beds and under constant lighting, before being transferred to a facility in Oakland and then to a larger detention facility in Arizona. According to a declaration Valera submitted to the court, he began experiencing numbness in half his body while in the cell and was taken to a San Francisco hospital for a day of observation before being returned to the holding cell. Attorneys said an immigration judge ordered his release about a week after his arrest, determining he had been unlawfully detained.

The December 24 order resolved a claim, in the same lawsuit, that was separate from one Pitts had already ruled on: a November 25, 2025 finding that ICE was unlawfully detaining people beyond its own 12-hour limit at a different San Francisco facility, 630 Sansome Street. The order here was, at the time, preliminary and geographically limited to ICE's San Francisco Area of Responsibility; the same courthouse-arrest policy, authorized nationwide, was separately found to lack internal legal authority by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York in a May 2026 ruling covering three Manhattan courthouses.

Updates

2026-06-23 — Pitts vacated ICE courthouse-arrest and detention policies nationwide [3, 4, 5]

Ruling on summary judgment in the same case, Pitts found ICE's courthouse-arrest policies and its waiver of the 12-hour short-term detention limit all violated the Administrative Procedure Act as arbitrary and capricious, and vacated the policies nationwide rather than limiting relief to the San Francisco Area of Responsibility. Pitts wrote the challenged policies could not be separated by region because the January 2025 policy had rescinded prior nationwide restrictions "in one fell swoop." The government argued the Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. CASA barred nationwide relief, but Pitts held that CASA addressed injunctions specifically and did not reach the APA's separate vacatur remedy.