Federal court bars ICE from arresting immigrants at three Manhattan federal courthouses after finding the agency lacked internal legal authority for the year-plus practice

On May 18, 2026, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York issued a 15-page stay barring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from arresting immigrants inside or around three federal courthouses in lower Manhattan: 26 Federal Plaza, 201 Varick Street, and 290 Broadway. The narrow exceptions in the order permit arrests only where an agent identifies an imminent national- security threat, public-safety risk, imminent violence, or imminent destruction of evidence in a criminal case. The order is geographically narrow — it covers only the three NYC courthouses named — and leaves the practice intact elsewhere in the country.

The newsworthy event is the judicial ruling, but the entry-recordable abuse is the conduct the court found in support of issuing it. ICE had conducted broad courthouse arrests of immigrants attending their own legally required hearings — including masked-agent operations in courthouse hallways and parking areas — for over a year. In March 2026, federal prosecutors admitted to the court that ICE had misled them about the legal authority underlying the practice. Judge Castel's order concludes the agency had no internal rules establishing legal authority for the courthouse-arrest expansion, and that the agency continued the practice after conceding the authority problem. A masked-agent arrest was witnessed at 26 Federal Plaza on the morning of May 18, in the hours between the court's review and the stay taking effect.

Two abuse dimensions interact. First, an armed federal agency conducted arrests at scale without identifiable internal legal basis, fitting the executive-overreach slug (executive actions exceeding constitutional or statutory authority). Second, those arrests occurred at the very immigration proceedings the same individuals were legally required to attend, fitting denial-of-due-process-in-immigration-enforcement: by making appearance at a hearing the trigger for detention, the practice chills lawful participation in the immigration-adjudication process, bypassing the procedural protections those hearings exist to provide.

The judicial ruling itself — Judge Castel's reversal of his own earlier 2025 sign-off on the practice after the agency continued it without authority — is not recorded as the abuse here. Courts ruling within their constitutional role, including reversing earlier sign-offs on the basis of new findings, are part of the system working. What's recorded is the year-plus course of executive-branch conduct the court has now formally found to lack internal legal basis, plus the agency's continuation of that conduct after admitting the authority problem.

The geographical narrowness of the ruling is editorially relevant: the same agency, the same statutory authorities, and the same practice presumably remain in effect at federal immigration courthouses outside the SDNY's jurisdiction. Reporting on parallel practices in other federal circuits, if surfaced, would warrant separate entries.