President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has confessed it spent nearly a year misleading a federal court about its justification for the mass arrest of immigrants at their own hearings.
The Trump administration launched its courthouse arrest practice following the president’s return to the White House, with federal agents regularly seizing migrants in hallways outside immigration courtrooms, sometimes within minutes of those migrants appearing before a judge to plead their cases.
Legal advocates said the tactic turned the immigration court system into an enforcement trap, punishing people for doing what the law required of them.
Now the Justice Department has acknowledged that the legal foundation the administration built its case on was never there.
The admission came in a letter filed Tuesday with Judge P. Kevin Castel by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The case—African Communities Together v. Lyons—was brought last year by civil rights groups challenging the administration’s practice of detaining migrants inside immigration courthouses, a policy that shocked attorneys and advocates, as people who had arrived to participate in their own legal hearings found themselves in handcuffs.
The hallways outside immigration courts became the scene of clashes between protesters and federal agents who would swoop in to arrest migrants attending mandatory hearings. / Spencer Platt/ Getty Images
At the center of the blunder is a May 27, 2025, ICE memorandum titled Civil Immigration Enforcement Actions in or Near Courthouses, which the government had repeatedly leaned on in its defense.
Clayton told Judge Castel, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, that ICE counsel informed the Justice Department on the morning the letter was filed that the guidance “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions” at immigration courts—which, critically, fall under the Justice Department’s own jurisdiction, not ICE’s.
The government is now withdrawing the relevant portions of multiple court briefs and statements made at a Sept. 2, 2025, oral argument that relied on the guidance.
Clayton acknowledged the full cascading nature of the error—that his attorneys had been specifically told by ICE that the guidance did apply to immigration courthouse arrests, obtained ICE approval before filing every brief in the case, and received that assurance throughout the litigation. The error, he wrote, “appears to have occurred because of agency attorney error.”
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said the May 2025 ICE guidance “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions.” / Brendan McDermid / Reuters
Immigration advocates were scathing. “ICE has claimed that a 2025 memorandum authorized and justified their devastating policy of conducting mass arrests at immigration courts,” Amy Belsher, director of immigrant rights litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a letter to Judge Castel.
“The government is now admitting that this document—which the court relied on to deny our clients relief—does not and never has authorized these courthouse arrests. It is another example of ICE’s brazen disregard for the lives of immigrants in this country.”
Amy Belsher is a supervising attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she leads litigation related to immigrants’ rights. / NYCLU
The NYCLU and American Civil Liberties Union said in a separate letter to Castel that “the implications of this development are far-reaching,” noting that migrants had continued to be arrested at immigration court appearances throughout the litigation—often held in far-flung facilities, sometimes across multiple state lines from where they were arrested.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, for comment.
