The RecordExhibit 115
Arresting immigrants at their immigration court hearings
Ruled unlawful means: A court ruled against it. Some rulings are on appeal.
In 2025, ICE agents began arresting people in the hallways of immigration courthouses as they left routine hearings, a practice the agency had long avoided out of concern it would discourage people from showing up to court.
What happened
ICE also waived its 12-hour limit on holding people in short-term holding rooms, allowing up to 72 hours. Much of the attention fell on 26 Federal Plaza, Manhattan's largest immigration court, where videos showed agents making arrests in the hallways. New York City's comptroller at the time, Brad Lander, was arrested while trying to escort someone past ICE agents after a court hearing. In the New York case, Judge P. Kevin Castel first allowed the arrests in September 2025, relying on the government's statement that a May 2025 ICE memo authorized them. ICE later admitted in court that the memo did not cover immigration courts, and federal prosecutors apologized to the judge for what they called a 'material mistaken statement of fact.' Castel's opinion notes the bind the arrests create: people risk detention if they attend their hearings and a deportation order if they stay away. Separately, in a final ruling in late September 2026, Judge Lewis Kaplan entered a permanent injunction for a class of people held in ICE's holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza. His 127-page ruling called the conditions there 'squalid' and found that detainees often had to try to sleep sitting upright because of overcrowding; he also said crowding had come down since last summer's peak.
Where it stands
On June 23, 2026, Judge P. Casey Pitts, ruling for an asylum seeker arrested as she left San Francisco's immigration court and two other plaintiffs, struck down the courthouse-arrest policies and the holding-time waiver nationwide. He found that ICE and the immigration court system had adopted them without the reasoned explanation the Administrative Procedure Act requires. In May 2026, after the government's admission, Castel reversed himself and blocked the arrests at three Manhattan immigration courts, with limited exceptions. In a final ruling reported on Oct. 1, 2026, he found the practice arbitrary and capricious and set the policy aside, noting that the government's briefs were silent on that question. Gothamist reports that the ruling vacated ICE's 2025 courthouse-arrest policy as it applies to immigration courthouses, which blocks the arrests in New York City and across the country. amNewYork and Newsweek also describe it as nationwide, while Courthouse News and the Washington Examiner describe it in terms of New York's immigration courts. Neither ruling bars every arrest at an immigration court: ICE goes back to earlier rules that allow them in limited circumstances.
The administration's side
In court, the government argued that expanding courthouse arrests was a deliberate and reasoned choice, and that where to make an arrest is left to the agency's discretion and is not for judges to review. ICE has also said protests made other places unsafe for arrests. After the June ruling, Homeland Security's general counsel, James Percival, compared the arrests to taking a defendant into custody at sentencing and said the same should happen when an immigration judge orders someone removed.
Sources
Permanent link: https://unredactedrecord.com/e/courthouse/