Biden-appointed judge strikes down ICE courthouse arrest policy, calls it ‘devoid of rational explanation’

A federal judge nominated by former President Joe Biden has vacated three Trump administration immigration enforcement policies in a single 71-page ruling, blocking ICE from broadly arresting illegal immigrants at courthouses and slashing the agency’s allowable short-term detention window from 72 hours back to 12.

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts declared the policies “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, finding that ICE and the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review failed to justify their departure from Biden-era restrictions. The ruling applies nationwide.

DHS fired back immediately. General Counsel James Percival called the decision “naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.” The clash marks the latest in a growing pattern of federal judges, many appointed by Democrats, intervening to halt or roll back the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities.

What the ruling actually does

Pitts vacated three distinct policies. The first two were ICE’s 2025 rules removing prior restrictions on civil immigration arrests at courthouses, including immigration courts. The third was a nationwide waiver that had extended ICE’s 12-hour short-term detention limit to 72 hours, a change the agency said was necessary because increased enforcement activity had strained detention capacity and complicated transfers to longer-term facilities.

The judge also struck down a related EOIR policy that had rescinded restrictions on immigration enforcement activity at immigration courthouses. The practical effect: Biden-era limitations on courthouse arrests, which confined such operations to narrow circumstances like national security threats and situations involving imminent danger, are effectively reinstated.

Pitts chose vacatur over a broad injunction, a distinction that matters legally. Rather than ordering ICE not to enforce the policies, he removed the policies themselves. He cited the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which held that sweeping nationwide injunctions are unconstitutional, and framed vacatur as the appropriate alternative remedy under the APA.

The judge’s reasoning, and its blind spots

At the heart of the ruling is a procedural argument: that ICE failed to think before it acted. Pitts wrote that the agency offered no reasoned explanation for abandoning its 2021 guidance, which had limited courthouse arrests out of concern they would discourage illegal immigrants from showing up to court hearings.

Fox News Digital reported Pitts wrote in his decision:

“ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policies are devoid of rational explanation for (or even acknowledgement of) the agency’s choices.”

He added that the agency “entirely fail[ed] to address the chilling effect of courthouse arrests on noncitizens’ attendance at [court proceedings],” calling that effect “an ‘important aspect of the problem’ in its own right.”

On the detention waiver, Pitts found ICE never engaged in “reasoned consideration of its obligation to avoid creating punitive conditions of confinement.” He also faulted the agency for failing to consider alternatives or reconcile the 72-hour limit with its own existing detention standards.

The ruling invoked a principle from Supreme Court precedent: “An agency may not… depart from a prior policy sub silentio.” In plain English, the government cannot quietly abandon a rule without explaining why.

That sounds reasonable in a law school seminar. In practice, it means a single district judge can freeze an elected administration’s enforcement agenda because the paperwork wasn’t detailed enough, even when the underlying policy goal, arresting people who have been ordered removed, is squarely within ICE’s statutory mandate.

DHS responds

Percival’s statement drew a sharp contrast between how the justice system treats criminal defendants and how courts are now treating illegal immigrants with final removal orders. He said:

“When a judge sentences a defendant, the defendant is taken into custody. If an alien is ordered removed by an immigration judge, the same should happen. A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.”

The comparison is hard to dismiss. Immigration judges issue removal orders after hearings where both sides present their case. If those orders carry no practical weight because ICE cannot arrest the person at the courthouse where the order was just issued, the entire system becomes an exercise in paperwork with no consequence.

ICE has long argued that courthouse arrests are among the safest methods for apprehending deportable individuals. Breitbart noted that the ruling directly undermines a key component of the administration’s enforcement strategy, since courthouses are controlled environments where agents can identify and detain targets without the risks associated with field operations in homes or on the street.

A pattern, not an isolated case

Pitts is no stranger to blocking the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Earlier this year, he blocked an ICE initiative to rearrest migrants who had previously been released. He also ordered sweeping changes at a San Francisco ICE detention facility, citing overcrowding and conditions he found likely violated constitutional standards.

He is not alone. A New York federal judge recently forced ICE back to Biden-era limits on courthouse immigration arrests. Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan largely barred ICE from conducting civil immigration arrests at or near three immigration courthouses last month while a separate legal challenge proceeds.

The broader landscape is unmistakable. Federal judges across the country have inserted themselves into immigration enforcement decisions at a pace that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

In one case, a Biden-appointed judge ordered ICE to release an illegal immigrant wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic. In another, a Maryland judge blocked the administration’s deportation efforts and rebuked DOJ conduct in the process.

The common thread is not complex legal doctrine. It is a judiciary that treats enforcement of immigration law as presumptively suspect, and treats the bureaucratic preferences of the prior administration as a baseline the current one must justify departing from, line by line, in writing, to a judge’s satisfaction.

The legal split that could force the issue

Pitts’ ruling creates a direct conflict with the New York decision. The Washington Examiner reported that Judge Castel ruled in the opposite direction in September, upholding the administration’s courthouse arrest authority. That split between two federal districts could provide grounds for Supreme Court review as the cases work through the appeals process.

For the administration, that may be the silver lining. The Supreme Court’s Trump v. CASA decision already signaled skepticism toward lower courts issuing sweeping orders that block federal policy nationwide. A circuit split on courthouse arrests could accelerate the timeline for the justices to weigh in on whether the APA can be weaponized to override executive enforcement discretion wholesale.

The case that triggered Pitts’ ruling involved an asylum seeker arrested while leaving a routine immigration court hearing in San Francisco, a fact pattern tailor-made to generate sympathy but one that also illustrates the basic absurdity of the legal framework the judge is defending. An agency tasked with enforcing removal orders is told it cannot arrest someone at the very building where those orders are issued.

This is not a case where ICE was acting outside its authority. The agency has clear statutory power to arrest and detain individuals subject to removal orders. What Pitts objected to was the paperwork, the failure to produce a sufficiently detailed written explanation for changing course from the Biden administration’s more permissive approach.

The judge even acknowledged the Supreme Court’s ruling against broad nationwide injunctions and styled his remedy as something different. But the practical effect is identical: a single district judge in California has, for now, dictated ICE enforcement policy for the entire country.

Meanwhile, federal judges have blocked Trump administration initiatives across a range of policy areas, from immigration to social spending reform, creating a judicial gauntlet that the executive branch must run on nearly every front.

Who pays the price

The people who bear the cost of these rulings are not the judges who issue them or the advocacy groups that file the suits. They are the ICE agents who must now figure out how to do their jobs under contradictory court orders from different jurisdictions. They are the communities where individuals with final removal orders remain because no one is allowed to pick them up. And they are the legal immigrants and asylum seekers who play by the rules, only to watch the system bend over backward to shield those who don’t.

Pitts framed his ruling as a defense of administrative law, the principle that agencies must explain their reasoning. Fair enough. But the APA was not designed to let judges substitute their policy preferences for those of the elected president. When the “reasoned explanation” standard becomes a one-way ratchet that only blocks enforcement and never blocks permissiveness, it stops being a neutral legal principle and starts functioning as a policy veto.

The judge wrote that “for 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act.” The same standard should apply to judges who use procedural technicalities to override the enforcement of duly enacted immigration law.

If courthouse arrests are the safest way to enforce removal orders, and removal orders are the product of due process, then blocking those arrests doesn’t protect the rule of law. It hollows it out, one 71-page opinion at a time.