A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Justice Department officials from making “absolute” civil arrests in immigration courts across Northern California, kickstarting an appellate court challenge to one of the Trump administration’s most controversial deportation tactics.
“This situation forces Hobson to choose between two irreparable harms to a noncitizen in deportation proceedings,” Judge P. Casey Pitts wrote in his ruling on Christmas Eve.
“First, they may appear in immigration court and possibly face arrest and detention,” the judge wrote. “Alternatively, noncitizens may choose not to appear and instead waive the opportunity to assert their right to seek asylum or other relief from deportation.”
Wednesday’s action would prevent ICE and the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Review from ambushing asylum seekers and other noncitizens at routine hearings across the region, effectively reinstating a pre-Trump ban on such arrests.
“This is ICE and EOIR. before The criteria are the policies governing arrests in courts and detention in detention centres,” the judge said.
Authorities have long curbed arrests in “sensitive locations” such as hospitals, places of worship and schools, keeping them out of the reach of most civilian immigration enforcement agents.
The designation was first established decades ago under ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. ICE absorbed the prohibitions when it was created in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
Courts were also added to the list under President Obama. The policy banning arrests in most courts was suspended during the first Trump administration but reinstated by President Biden.
Internal ICE guidance from the Biden administration states that “carrying out private immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses can chill individuals’ access to the courts and thereby undermine the impartial administration of justice.”
Nevertheless, the court’s policy was reversed again earlier this year, leading to a spike in arrests and a staggering drop in court attendance, court records show.
Most people who don’t show up will be asked to leave for their absence.
Monthly removal orders in absentia more than doubled from less than 1,600 in 2024 to 4,177 this year.
Since January, more than 50,000 asylum seekers have been ordered deported for failing to appear for court hearings, more than the number of asylum seekers ordered deported in absentia in the previous five years combined.
“ICE cannot choose to ignore the “costs” of a new policy that discourage noncitizen participation in removal proceedings and consider only the immigration “benefits” of that policy,” Pitts wrote in the stay order.
The ruling will likely put San Francisco’s lawsuit on a collision course with other lawsuits seeking to stop ICE from entering spaces that were previously considered off-limits. The case was brought by a group of asylum seekers who were detained when they risked their lives to appear in court.
One of them, a 24-year-old Guatemalan asylum seeker named Yulisa Alvarado Ambrosio, was spared detention only because her 11-month-old breast-feeding baby was with her in court, records show. Lawyers for the administration told the court that ICE would almost certainly pick her up at the next hearing.
Such arrests appear arbitrary and capricious and are unlikely to withstand scrutiny by a court, Judge Pitts ruled Wednesday.
“Broad-based civil arrests in immigration courts are a ‘key aspect of the problem’ that ICE should have considered but failed to consider, because they can have a chilling effect on the attendance of noncitizens in removal proceedings (as common sense, prior guidance, and practical experience in immigration courts since May 2025 make clear), thereby undermining this central purpose,” Pitts wrote.
A district judge in Manhattan ruled against him in a similar case this fall, splitting the circuit and raising the possibility of a Supreme Court challenge to the arrest in 2026.
For now, Christmas Eve’s decision applies only to ICE’s San Francisco area of responsibility. This region includes all of Northern and Central California as far south as Bakersfield.
The geographic restrictions were created in response to an emergency Supreme Court ruling earlier this year stripping local judges of their power to block federal policy except in limited circumstances.
The administration has told the court it intends to appeal to the Ninth Circuit, where judges appointed by President Trump have shifted the court sharply to the right from its long-standing liberal reputation.
