Federal Judge Issues Nationwide Block on ICE Courthouse Arrests and 12-Hour Detention Cap Waiver

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has delivered the broadest ruling yet against Trump administration courthouse arrest practices, striking down two separate ICE policies in a 71-page opinion issued Tuesday.

The ruling in Pablo Sequen v. Albarran covers two distinct policies. First, it vacates the Trump administration's 2025 directives that authorized ICE and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) to arrest noncitizens at immigration courthouses. Second, it strikes down ICE's June 2025 "nationwide Hold Room Waiver," which had eliminated the 12-hour cap on holding detainees in short-term processing cells lacking beds, showers, and adequate medical care, according to reporting by CBS News and court filings cited by YubaNet.

Both invalidations were granted under Section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act, the 1946 law that requires federal agencies to provide reasoned justifications for policy changes. Pitts found the courthouse arrest policy "arbitrary and capricious" because, in his words, "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 decision-making but a complete lack of decisionmaking."

On the detention waiver, CBS News reported that Pitts found the extended holds also violated the Fifth Amendment, constituting "punitive conditions of confinement" because ICE held some detainees at an immigration center in San Francisco for more than 12 hours — and often overnight or for multiple days — in facilities designed strictly for short-term processing.

DHS General Counsel James Percival criticized the decision. "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 on X. He called the ruling "naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda."

The administration's core position is straightforward: immigration judges issue removal orders, and a defendant in criminal court is taken into custody when sentenced. Why should an immigration removal order be treated differently? The DOJ had also argued that any block should be limited to Northern California rather than applied nationwide, precisely to avoid disrupting federal enforcement operations across the country.

Pitts rejected the geographic limit, writing: "It is far from obvious that vacating the courthouse-arrest policies will significantly hinder ICE's operations." He ruled that ICE still has ample authority to arrest noncitizens outside courthouses.

This is the second federal court to strike down the courthouse arrest policy. U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in New York reached the same "arbitrary and capricious" conclusion last month, but that order applied only in New York, according to PBS News. Castel similarly found that the Trump administration's withdrawal of prior limits on enforcement actions at immigration courts was "arbitrary and capricious."

The Pitts ruling supersedes Castel's in geographic scope, making the nationwide block the operative legal barrier. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, alongside a coalition of civil rights organizations, filed the motion for summary judgment that produced Tuesday's ruling on January 29, 2026.

PBS News noted an additional procedural detail: after Trump took office, ICE agents and DHS attorneys developed a coordinated tactic. Government attorneys would move to dismiss cases in immigration court, then plainclothes ICE agents would arrest the individuals in hallways. Pitts specifically called out that ICE's own policies provided no exception for people with pending, potentially meritorious legal claims.

ZeroHedge's write-up focused primarily on the courthouse arrest portion of the ruling and did not cover the separate 12-hour detention cap element. The hold room waiver, reinstating limits on short-term detention conditions, is a distinct policy invalidation with its own legal and operational consequences for ICE capacity management.

The Justice Department has not publicly announced whether it will seek an emergency stay or appeal to the Ninth Circuit. The unresolved question is whether the Ninth Circuit would grant a stay pending appeal, which would temporarily restore ICE's courthouse arrest authority while litigation continues. That determination would hinge partly on whether the government can show the kind of "reasoned explanation" Pitts found entirely absent from the original policy record.