U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts granted a motion for partial summary judgment in favor of a trio of asylum-seekers and also certified multiple classes, finding that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review haven't offered reasonable explanations for changing their policies.
"For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act," Judge Pitts said. "That instruction — codified in the Administrative Procedures Act — does not require an agency to make the choice that a reviewing court might deem preferable. But it demands that an agency at least provide sound reasons for following its chosen course."
The judge said the policies challenged by the suit are arbitrary and capricious "in contravention of the APA" and therefore must be vacated in full.
Judge Pitts noted that his order does not "preclude ICE from conducting civil enforcement actions at courthouses; it merely reinstates ICE's 2021 guidance and EOIR's 2023 guidance, which authorized courthouse arrests in defined circumstances."
The judge on Tuesday also certified two classes: one of all persons who've had an immigration court hearing in a proceeding on EOIR's nondetained docket in an immigration courthouse in ICE's San Francisco field office "area of responsibility" and another of all persons who are now or will be detained in a holding cell in ICE's San Francisco field office.
The suit was initially filed by Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen, an asylum-seeker from Guatemala with no criminal record who said she was arrested after an immigration hearing in July and held overnight at the ICE facility. On Sept. 16, Judge Pitts granted her request for a preliminary injunction requiring ICE to release her from custody and enjoining ICE from re-detaining her without notice and a prearrest hearing.
Sequen first filed her complaint in August of last year, and it was later amended to add Ligia Garcia and Yulisa Alvarado Ambrocio, asylum-seekers from Colombia and Guatemala, respectively. Last October, Judge Pitts granted a preliminary injunction barring ICE from detaining them as well.
The plaintiffs alleged that the administration unlawfully reversed federal policies to allow ICE to arrest people in areas that have long been off-limits and to detain people for longer amounts of time in a facility that falls far short of legal requirements and the agency's own standards. The situation has become unworkable for immigrants facing hearings in courts in San Francisco; Concord, Connecticut; and Sacramento, California, they said.
According to the complaint, the Trump administration unlawfully scrapped policies limiting immigration enforcement in areas such as courthouses in a push to ramp up immigrant arrests that's focused almost entirely on numbers rather than the records of the people being arrested.
In Tuesday's ruling, Judge Pitts said that the federal government spent more than six months arguing that ICE's 2025 courthouse arrest policies represented "an intentional and reasoned choice to expand arrests at immigration courthouses." But that argument was unconvincing, he said.
"It is now clear that the lack of connection between ICE's stated rationales for the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies and the expansion of arrests at immigration courthouses results not from merely unreasoned decisionmaking but a complete lack of decisionmaking," the judge said.
He said the government recently revealed that — "contrary to its prior representations" — the 2025 policies don't actually cover immigration courthouses at all. And that means they rescind 2021 guidance without a replacement, "leaving no restrictions whatsoever on ICE agents' civil enforcement actions at immigration courthouses," the judge said.
"Even the scant limitations imposed by the 2025 policies on ICE's actions at other courthouses — like the instruction for ICE agents to 'minimize their impact on court proceedings' — have no application to immigration courthouses," he said.
Judge Pitts said the policies are thus arbitrary and capricious for several reasons, including that ICE failed to even "display awareness" that it was changing its courthouse arrest policies. The new policies also disregard the facts and circumstances underlying the prior policy and practices, and the government made no attempt to adequately explain its shift in approach, according to the opinion.
He made similar findings as to EOIR's policy changes, a departure from its long-standing limits to civil arrests at courthouses. That policy change is "based on a false premise," but regardless, the EOIR also fails to provide a rational explanation for removing "all prior limits on civil enforcement actions at EOIR's immigration courthouses," Judge Pitts said.
ICE, the U.S. Department of Justice and counsel for the plaintiffs didn't immediately respond to requests for comment late Tuesday. However, U.S. Department of Homeland Security general counsel James Percival said in a post on X that "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," Percival wrote Tuesday. "A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda."
The plaintiffs are represented by Mark L. Hejinian, Marcia V. Valente, David C. Beach, Charmaine G. Yu, Evan G. Campbell and Darien Lo of Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP, Neil K. Sawhney and Lauren M. Davis of the American Civil Liberties Foundation of Northern California, Marissa Hatton, Andrew Ntim, Jordan Wells and Nisha Kashyap of Lawyers' Committee For Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Laura Victoria Sánchez and Tala Berardi Hartsough of Carecen SF.
The government is represented by William Skewes-Cox of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California.
The case is Carmen Aracely Pablo Sequen et al. v. Sergio Albarran et al., case number 5:25-cv-06487, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
--Additional reporting by Bonnie Eslinger. Editing by Michael Watanabe.
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