On June 23, 2026, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California vacated, nationwide, ICE's 2025 courthouse-arrest policies, a parallel policy of the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, and ICE's nationwide waiver of its long-standing 12-hour limit on holding people in short-term facilities, which had allowed stays of up to 72 hours.
In a 71-page ruling, Pitts found the policies arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, the statute requiring agencies to explain their reasoning before changing policy. He wrote that “for 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act,” and that “ICE's 2025 courthouse-arrest policies are devoid of rational explanation for (or even acknowledgement of) the agency's choices.” He found the policies failed to address the chilling effect of courthouse arrests on immigrants' attendance at hearings, the reason ICE's 2021 guidance had limited such arrests to narrow circumstances.
On the detention waiver, Pitts found ICE had not considered alternatives or reconciled the change with its own detention standards, writing that nothing in the record “suggests that ICE engaged in reasoned consideration of its obligation to avoid creating punitive conditions of confinement.” The waiver had allowed longer detention in ICE facilities built for brief stays.
Pitts certified two classes of affected immigrants and vacated the policies under the APA, which made the ruling nationwide, and denied the government's request to pause the case pending appeal. ICE remains free to adopt new policies if it provides the reasoned explanation the law requires. DHS General Counsel James Percival called the ruling “naked judicial activism in service of an anti-American, open borders agenda” (see ICE Arrested a Man at a Manhattan Immigration Court the Day After a Federal Judge Ordered Those Arrests Paused).
Correction (October 2, 2026): The entry said short-term ICE holding rooms “are not built for overnight detention”; the cited reporting says only that they were built for brief periods, and the passage was rewritten to the ruling's own findings. The title said the judge called both policies devoid of rational explanation; he used that phrase for the courthouse-arrest policies, and the title now says so. The entry now also notes the EOIR policy the ruling vacated and DHS's response.