Um, is there federal law that states this, or did the judge just make it up?
A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Justice Department counterpart from “sweeping” civil arrests at immigration courthouses across Northern California, teeing up an appellate challenge to one of the Trump administration’s most controversial deportation tactics.
“This circumstance presents noncitizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms,” Judge P. Casey Pitts wrote in his Christmas Eve decision.
“First, they may appear in immigration court and face likely arrest and detention,” the judge wrote. “Alternatively, noncitizens may choose not to appear and instead to forego their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief from removal.”
Wednesday’s decision blocks ICE and the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review from lying in wait for asylum seekers and other noncitizens at routine hearings throughout the region — a move that would effectively restore pre-Trump prohibition on such arrests.
So, the judge was applying federal law, right?
The designation was first established decades ago under ICE’s predecessor agency, Immigration and Naturalization Services. ICE absorbed the prohibitions when the agency was formed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Courts were added to the list under President Obama. The policy prohibiting most courthouse arrests was suspended during the first Trump administration and reinstated by President Biden.
In fact, there is no law that prohibits federal law enforcement from detaining anyone who violates federal law at any courthouse. Read the decision, and nowhere in there does Judge Howdy Doody cite federal law prohibiting the just exercise of federal law, in this case, picking up people who are in violate of federal immigration law.
“That widespread civil arrests at immigration courts could have a chilling effect on noncitizens’ attendance at removal proceedings (as common sense, the prior guidance, and the actual experience in immigration court since May 2025 make clear) and thereby undermine this central purpose is thus ‘an important aspect of the problem’ that ICE was required, but failed, to consider,” Pitts wrote.
Well, yeah, people who are breaking the law tend to avoid places where it is easy to arrest them. Anyhow, this only applies to Northern California and parts of central Ca. The Trump admin will appeal this.
Detention is mostly for entertainment value only
King Donald 1st has announced a new record high of 68000 in detention ! That is 1/200 of those “illegals” in the USA. At that rate it will take 200 years to be migrant free. Are you entertained?
President Biden, then head of the executive branch of government, ordered ICE and the Border Patrol not to enforce our immigration laws, and look what it got us.
So now we have a federal judge, head of nothing other than his own district court, part of the judicial branch, trying to exercise executive authority over a part of the executive branch.
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The unhinged William lets fly at immigrants and judges! Immigrants, often seeking asylum legally, do the right thing, and go to court only to be captured by Big Donnie, baby killer’s (thanks Epstein files), goons and thugs and be exported to El Salvador torture chambers without due process.
The judge, who went to judge school, correctly called this a Hobson’s choice, much like Jean Valjean lifting the cart off the man.
Fuck off.