Another Biden-appointed district judge has stepped in to blunt a key President Trump immigration-enforcement tool.

On June 23, 2026, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts in the Northern District of California issued a 71-page order vacating the administration’s ICE and EOIR courthouse-arrest policies, along with ICE’s waiver expanding short-term detention.

The case is Pablo Sequen v. Albarran, number 5:25-cv-06487-PCP. Pitts was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden.

DHS did not take it quietly.

DHS General Counsel James Percival fired back hard, comparing a removal order to a criminal sentence and calling the judge’s intervention exactly what it looks like.

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Here is the actual scope.

U.S. District Court order grants class certification and partial summary judgment to the plaintiffs on Administrative Procedure Act claims. Pitts ruled that ICE and EOIR failed to provide a reasoned explanation for the challenged policies, then vacated those policies nationwide in full.

Two pieces were at the center of it. The first was ICE and EOIR’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policies, which lifted earlier restrictions on civil arrests at immigration courthouses.

The second was ICE’s waiver expanding short-term detention from the usual 12-hour limit up to 72 hours nationwide.

The judge called the 2025 courthouse-arrest guidance “devoid of rational explanation” for removing those earlier limits, and labeled the whole approach arbitrary and capricious under the APA.

The case grew out of asylum-seekers being arrested or threatened with arrest after immigration court hearings in the San Francisco area, plus challenges to conditions at the 630 Sansome Street ICE facility.

Fox News reported that Pitts struck down the rules expanding courthouse arrests and prolonged detention in ICE holding facilities, and noted that he has repeatedly intervened against Trump administration immigration policies.

Fox also carried Percival’s response, in which the DHS general counsel said an alien ordered removed should be taken into custody just like a sentenced defendant, and that a district judge ordering otherwise is naked judicial activism in service of an open-borders agenda.

Fox also put the ruling in the broader court-fight pattern, noting Pitts had previously blocked an ICE initiative involving rearrests of migrants already released by the agency.

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That matters because the ruling reaches directly into removal operations, beyond a minor paperwork dispute. It is another district-court ruling aimed at how President Trump’s team carries out removals inside the immigration system.

The practical effect lands fast. KTVU reported that immigration agents must immediately reduce their presence inside immigration courthouses, and that the ruling applies across the country rather than only in California.

KTVU also pointed back to the dramatic arrests that played out in immigration courthouse hallways under the policy, and said the Trump administration is expected to challenge the decision. It described the ruling as forcing agents to step back from a visible enforcement posture at immigration-court locations.

That challenge matters, because a single district judge in San Jose just set nationwide policy from the bench.

Precision matters on the scope here. The order vacates the challenged 2025 policies and effectively restores the narrower prior limits that existed before.

ICE still retains immigration-enforcement authority, but this ruling blocks the policy framework the administration used for broader courthouse arrests and longer short-term holds.

The administration’s 2025 guidance was hardly a blank check to begin with.

According to the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, the January 2025 ICE guidance focused enforcement on national security and public safety threats, certain criminal convictions, gang members, people ordered removed who failed to depart, and aliens who re-entered illegally.

Other noncitizens encountered at courthouses could be evaluated case by case, and agents were instructed to operate discreetly and coordinate with courthouse security when practicable.

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The tracker also notes that the May 27, 2025 Lyons memo stripped out some jurisdictional and local coordination language while otherwise keeping the earlier guidance in place.

So the targets were criminals, gang members, and people who already lost their removal cases and refused to leave. A Biden judge decided that taking those people into custody at the courthouse was arbitrary and capricious.

The logic Percival laid out is hard to argue with. When a defendant is sentenced, he goes into custody on the spot.

When an immigration judge orders an alien removed, the same should hold.

This ruling is one district court order, and it is headed for appeal. The Trump team built its enforcement around criminal aliens and people who already exhausted their cases, and DHS is signaling it intends to fight to keep that authority intact.

One Biden appointee in San Jose just handed the country a nationwide rule. The administration now takes it to the higher courts, and the pressure to restore real enforcement at immigration courthouses is not going away.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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