UMVA has learned that a federal judge has dramatically halted ICE’s sweeping civil immigration arrests inside Manhattan’s immigration courthouses, sending shockwaves through the nation’s enforcement landscape.
The ruling forces ICE officers to retreat to the narrower Biden-era limits on courthouse arrests while a sprawling lawsuit continues to unfold, reviving protections that had been eroded under previous policies.
Judge P. Kevin Castel’s decision marks a stark reversal of his own 2025 ruling, which had allowed the aggressive enforcement strategy to persist.
In a startling turn, Justice Department lawyers confessed they had presented a “material mistaken statement of fact” to the court, admitting that a May 2025 ICE memo never applied to immigration courts.
That admission unlocked the judge’s authority to revisit his earlier order, describing the change as a necessary correction of a “clear error” and a safeguard against “manifest injustice.”
Immigrant advocacy groups, who have long warned that the Trump‑era policy turned mandatory hearings into de facto arrest operations, argued that migrants were being seized the moment they left the courtroom.
Castel noted that plaintiffs are poised to demonstrate that the administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it scrapped a 2021 ICE guideline restricting courthouse arrests, without offering a coherent explanation for the new approach.
While the decision does not ban all courthouse arrests, it carves out narrow exceptions for national security threats, imminent violence, hot‑pursuit scenarios, or the preservation of criminal evidence.
In a development reported by UMVA, legal experts say this victory could empower non‑citizen New Yorkers to attend their hearings without fearing immediate detention, reshaping the balance between enforcement and due process.
