BREAKING: Biden-appointed judge blocks ICE from making arrests at immigration courts
Pitts labeled the policy as “arbitrary and capricious."
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Pitts labeled the policy as “arbitrary and capricious."
A federal judge has ruled on a policy from the Trump administration, blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making arrests at immigration courts.
A Biden appointee, US District Judge P. Casey Pitts, ruled that ICE cannot detain illegal immigrants at immigration courts after the policy was implemented by the Trump administration via executive order last year. Pitts labeled the policy as “arbitrary and capricious" and claimed that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
"Because the record before the court demonstrates that ICE and EOIR failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions, the Court concludes that each of the challenged policies is arbitrary and capricious in contravention of the APA," Pitts wrote. "The Court therefore grants plaintiffs’ motions for partial summary judgment and vacates the challenged policies in full."
He later added, “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."
Pitts claimed that "ICE is not arresting individuals who appear for criminal or civil violations 'unrelated' to the arrest but instead arresting noncitizens based on the very immigration offenses for which the noncitizens are appearing in immigration court." He also wrote that the policy had violated the Fifth Amendments rights of detainees.
https://twitter.com/DHSGenCounsel/status/2069551898231730568
"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. A district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda," DHS General Counsel James Percival said in a post to X in response to the decision.
The policy of taking illegal immigrants into custody at immigration courts started during the Trump administration and has made the president's crackdown on illegal immigration much more effective than having to arrest detainees outside the security of a courthouse.
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