A federal judge on Tuesday struck down four Trump administration immigration enforcement policies, ruling that officials at two federal agencies failed to meet even the most basic legal standard when they rewrote longstanding rules governing arrests at courthouses and detention in holding facilities.
U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts, sitting in the Northern District of California, issued a decision vacating the challenged policies after concluding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review had offered no legally sufficient justification for abandoning restrictions that had been in place for decades. The ruling effectively restores the previous restrictions that federal agencies had imposed on arrests at courthouses and the use of brief detention holds.
Four Policies Thrown Out
The court granted the plaintiffs’ motions for summary judgment, finding that all four policies — ICE Policy No. 11072.3, ICE Policy No. 11072.4, ICE’s Nationwide Hold Room Waiver memorandum, and EOIR Operating Policy 25-06 — were arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Judge Pitts found that none of the four satisfied the law’s requirement that agencies supply reasoned explanations whenever they change existing policy. The EOIR memorandum faced an additional defect: the court determined it rested on an incorrect assumption about whether ICE’s own underlying policy changes were legally valid in the first place.
Writing in forceful terms, Pitts invoked eight decades of administrative law to frame the stakes. “For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” Pitts wrote, adding that while the APA does not require an agency to make whatever choice a court might prefer, it does demand that the agency at least supply sound reasons for the path it chooses. Elsewhere in the order, Pitts found that ICE had not even managed to supply “even a rudimentary reason” for eliminating the longstanding courthouse enforcement limits.
The Case Behind the Ruling
The lawsuit, Pablo Sequen v. Albarran, is a federal class action brought on behalf of noncitizens who were taken into custody by ICE while appearing for scheduled proceedings before immigration judges. Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, the lead plaintiff in the case, is an asylum applicant from Guatemala whom ICE agents apprehended as she exited the San Francisco immigration court in July 2025. Her arrest became the human face of a broader legal challenge to the administration’s aggressive push to treat immigration courthouses as viable enforcement zones rather than neutral legal venues.
President Donald Trump’s administration had moved early and decisively to dismantle the prior rules, which had long shielded courthouse environs from civil immigration enforcement on the grounds that such protections encouraged immigrants to appear voluntarily for their legal proceedings. Critics of the administration’s approach argued that courthouse arrests deter not just defendants but also witnesses, victims, and other participants in the justice system from showing up at all.
A Pattern of Legal Setbacks
Tuesday’s ruling is the latest in a string of courtroom defeats for the administration on this specific front. A federal judge in New York reached strikingly similar conclusions in a May holding in African Communities Together v. Lyons. That same New York federal bench also upheld the state’s Protect Our Court Act last November, rejecting the Trump administration’s contention that the state law — which prohibits federal immigration enforcement actions in and around courthouse facilities — violates the Supremacy Clause.
The controversy has not remained confined to civil litigation. Last December, a Wisconsin judge faced felony obstruction convictions after guiding an immigrant appearing in court to use a private courthouse door to evade ICE agents who were waiting outside. That conviction drew sharp attention to the tensions mounting between federal immigration enforcement priorities and local judicial actors across the country.
Judge Pitts made clear that his ruling was not a verdict on the wisdom of the underlying policy choices but rather a judgment about process. Federal agencies, the court said, are free to change course — but they must explain why, and the explanation must be grounded in reason rather than asserted by decree.