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.
Read: Unhinged Judge Tells ICE To Not Arrest Criminal Illegals At Courthouses »
Anglican Deacon Michael Van Dusen typically has plans for the Christmas season that do not involve a Toronto courthouse.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Professional protester Greta Thunberg was arrested Tuesday in Central London while part of a mass gathering backing the Palestine Action terrorist group.
