The Trump administration decided it was a great idea to start arresting people inside immigration courthouses, hold them in cells for three days, and call it a day. A federal judge in California looked at all of that, called it 'arbitrary and capricious,' and threw the whole thing in the trash. Seventy-one pages of trash.
What ICE Was Actually Doing
Let's be precise about this, because the details matter. According to The Guardian, the Trump administration quietly rolled back longstanding limits on arrests at immigration courthouses and extended how long detainees could be held in short-term facilities from 12 hours to 72 hours. Three days in a short-term cell. For someone who showed up to their own immigration hearing.
The case that triggered this ruling was brought by an asylum seeker who was arrested after walking out of a routine hearing at a San Francisco immigration court. Not a fugitive. Not a national security threat. Someone who showed up when the government told them to, and got grabbed on the way out.
Previous policy, as the ruling lays out, limited courthouse arrests to specific narrow circumstances: national security threats, imminent danger, or 'hot pursuit' of someone posing a public safety risk. The Trump administration scrapped all of that without, according to Judge Pitts, bothering to explain why.
The Judge Did Not Hold Back
US District Judge P. Casey Pitts, of the Northern District of California, issued the 71-page ruling on Tuesday, vacating the ICE policies and a parallel policy from the Justice Department's executive office for immigration review that had also stripped limits on courthouse arrests. The Guardian reports that Pitts was appointed by Joe Biden, which the administration's allies will immediately treat as the only relevant fact here.
The ruling reinstated Biden-era limits: courthouse arrests only under narrow circumstances, detentions in short-term facilities capped at 12 hours. In other words, the rules that existed before the current administration decided the rules were inconvenient.
Pitts quoted the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to provide 'reasoned explanations' before rescinding existing policy. His summary of the administration's effort to do so was not flattering. 'For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,' he wrote. The implication being: these people did not think.
The Government's Very Measured Response
The Department of Homeland Security's general counsel, James Percival, took to Twitter to respond to a federal court ruling the way all serious legal professionals do. The Guardian reports he called the decision 'naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda.'
Naked judicial activism. That is the official legal opinion of the Department of Homeland Security's top lawyer, posted on social media, about a ruling that said the administration failed to follow a law that has been on the books for eight decades. You really have to hand it to them for consistency.
There was no indication in the reporting that the administration plans to modify its policies to actually comply with the APA. There was every indication they plan to appeal. That's the playbook: lose in court, call the judge a radical, appeal, repeat.
Why Courthouse Arrests Are a Particular Kind of Terrible
Here's the thing that gets lost when this gets reduced to a red-versus-blue immigration fight. Arresting people at immigration courthouses is not just a civil liberties problem. It is a functional problem for the entire legal system.
If showing up to your own immigration hearing gets you arrested, immigrants stop showing up to hearings. Witnesses stop cooperating with law enforcement. Crime victims who are undocumented stop calling the police. Prosecutors lose cases because witnesses won't testify. The system stops working, not just for immigrants, but for everyone.
The old rules limiting courthouse arrests existed for a reason. They were not soft-on-crime coddling. They were a recognition that courts only function when people can use them without fearing that the act of participation will be used against them. The Trump administration treated that logic as a bug rather than a feature.
The Dingo Take
The Trump administration has now made 'arbitrary and capricious' into something of a signature. Courts have applied that phrase to their policies on student loans, environmental rules, and now immigration enforcement. At some point you have to wonder whether anyone in this White House has ever read the Administrative Procedure Act, or whether they just assumed that wanting something very badly counts as a legal justification.
The DHS general counsel calling a federal ruling 'anti-American' on social media is the kind of thing that would have ended a career ten years ago. Now it's just Tuesday. The argument being made, implicitly, is that any court that rules against the administration is illegitimate by definition. That's not a legal strategy. That's how you describe governments that don't believe in judicial review.
Judge Pitts put it plainly: Congress has required agencies to think before they act. An 80-year-old law. Not a radical concept. The administration arrested a man walking out of his own hearing, held people in cells for three days without proper justification, and apparently could not write down a coherent reason for any of it. The judge noticed. The law noticed. The only people who didn't notice are the ones calling him an activist for pointing it out.
