A federal judge has blocked federal immigration agents from arresting people inside New York City’s immigration court after the agency mistakenly told officers to do so.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told top government lawyers that its officers can arrest people inside immigration courthouses, where agents standing outside courtroom doors have swiftly cuffed thousands of immigrants immediately after they left their hearings, drawing chaotic scenes across the country.
In a letter to a federal judge in March, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan repeatedly expressed “regret” that his office mistakenly defended a memo that “does not and has never applied” to immigration court arrests.
District Judge Keven Castel had previously declined to strike down the policy, but after the government’s recent admission, he issued a new order to “correct a clear error and prevent a manifest injustice.”
His previous decision “relied upon the clearly erroneous premise” that ICE agents could arrest people in immigration court, he wrote Monday.
Unlike federal district courts, immigration courts and judges operate under the Department of Justice at the direction of the attorney general.
Last year, Donald Trump’s administration ordered immigration judges to dismiss virtually any case when immigrants show up for their court-mandated hearings — making them immediately vulnerable to arrest and removal before they’ve had a chance to appeal.
That policy sparked scenes of masked agents patrolling courthouse hallways and hauling away immigrants who were then placed in fast-tracked removal proceedings in what critics called “ambush”-style arrests that violated due process protections.
In a separate case last year, another federal judge slammed the policy of courthouse arrests as a “game of detention roulette.”
A lawsuit from advocacy groups The Door and African Communities Together challenged what they called the Trump administration’s “sweeping, unprecedented campaign of targeting noncitizens” in immigration courts.
In a memo sent to all Enforcement and Removal officers on March 19 and revealed in court documents, ICE’s assistant director of field operations Liana Castano clarified that the agency’s arrest policy “does not apply” to immigration courts, “regardless of their location.”
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in Manhattan then blamed ICE and the agency’s legal team for having “specifically informed” his office that the memo “applied to immigration courthouse arrests,” he told Judge Castel in March.
“Based on our discussions with ICE today, this regrettable error appears to have occurred because of agency attorney error,” Clayton wrote.
Monday’s ruling “is an enormous win for noncitizen New Yorkers seeking to safely attend their immigration court proceedings,” said Amy Belsher, director of Immigrants’ Rights Litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“For nearly a year, we’ve watched masked ICE officers ambush noncitizens in courthouse hallways, throw immigrant New Yorkers to the ground, and tear children from their parents,” she said in a statement. “Now, ICE has admitted that it does not and has never had an explanation or justification for conducting mass arrests at immigration courts. We look forward to a final ruling in the case that sets aside these cruel, pointless policies once and for all.”
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it is “common sense to take illegal aliens into custody following the completion of their removal proceedings.”
“Nothing prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them,” a spokesperson said. “We are confident we will ultimately be vindicated in this case.”
Immigrant advocacy groups suing ICE over those arrests told the judge that there is “no evidence that the agency engaged in reasoned decision-making when enacting this dramatic change in policy.
“Hundreds of real people — with families, schools, medical appointments, jobs and lives — arrived at immigration courts to attend mandatory hearings only to be summarily arrested by ICE agents outside the courtrooms as they left pursuant to ICE’s unreasoned policy,” they wrote in court filings last month.
“The harms resulting from the new policy have been immediate and severe: absent limitations on who ICE will arrest, each and every noncitizen must now make a choice to either attend their mandatory hearings and face unlawful arrest resulting in loss of employment, family separation, and the interruption of medical care or live with in absentia removal order hanging over their heads,” they said.
