A federal judge in Manhattan has barred ICE from arresting most immigrants inside New York City’s three immigration courthouses.
The stay, granted by Judge Kevin Castel Monday, comes after a nearly year-long legal fight over arrests inside immigration courthouses, which became the face of ICE enforcement in New York City under the Trump administration.
While the lawsuit continues, the order bars ICE from targeting most immigrants for arrest inside courts at 26 Federal Plaza, 201 Varick Street and 290 Broadway — except in extenuating circumstances of public safety or national security.
Asked about the stay, an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security called it “commonplace” to “take illegal aliens into custody following the completion of their removal proceedings.”
“Nothing prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them,” the spokesperson said. “We are confident we will ultimately be vindicated in this case.”
Almost exactly a year ago, masked ICE agents started stalking the halls of New York City’s immigration courts, targeting immigrants for arrest who were appearing for routine hearings in their deportation cases. Rather than targeting immigrants at the end of their deportation proceedings, ICE agents were often grabbing people attending master calendar hearings, the first or second appearance in their deportation cases, long before they’d had the chance to defend their case to stay in the country.
At the time, THE CITY reported relentlessly on these arrests and released the first estimates of how many were occurring, finding that New York City was targeted more than any other city in the country. In the months since, hundreds more have been arrested inside immigration courts.
These arrests, along with the firings of immigration judges, have helped reshape immigration courts for years to come and forced immigrants facing deportation to make an impossible choice — show up to court and risk arrest and detention, or miss a hearing and be ordered removed in absentia.
Last summer the NYCLU, African Communities Together and other immigrant advocacy groups sued to block the arrests, arguing the policy change was a violation of Administrative Procedures Act. At the time, a federal judge declined to step in, largely because the Trump administration pointed to new internal guidance that they said justified the change in policy even though the memo didn’t explicitly mention immigration courts.
That guidance, the administration claimed at the time, replaced a 2021 policy memo that barred most ICE arrests in immigration courthouses except in extenuating circumstances of national security or public safety.
But in a striking reversal this March, attorneys for the Justice Department said that their earlier submissions were wrong and the memo they had relied on didn’t actually apply to immigration courthouse arrests at all.
The 2025 memo “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review,” a letter to Judge Castel read, which withdrew key parts of the administration’s defense of the immigration courthouse arrest policy. “We deeply regret that this error has come to light at this late stage.”
Due to that reversal, seven months after the initial lawsuit was filed, Castel ruled Monday the NYCLU and others were likely to be able to prove the policy change was “arbitrary and capricious” and issued a stay while he continued to evaluate if the arrest policy violates the Administrative Procedures Act.
“This ruling is a relief to the hundreds of immigrants with future hearings,” said Melissa Chua, the Director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, whose attorneys have been a constant presence at the courthouses since ICE arrests began.
“For nearly a year, we’ve watched masked ICE officers ambush noncitizens in courthouse hallways, throw immigrant New Yorkers to the ground, and tear children from their parents,” said Amy Belsher, director of Immigrants’ Rights Litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, in a statement.
“We look forward to a final ruling in the case that sets aside these cruel, pointless policies once and for all.”
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