ICE Courthouse Arrests Trigger California’s 100th Suit

California’s 100th lawsuit against the Trump administration challenges federal immigration arrests at or near state courthouses. People accused of civil immigration violations have been taken into custody while trying to take part in court proceedings. The state says the arrests interfere with victims, witnesses and defendants—and put federal enforcement power directly across the path to the courthouse door.

“The victims are losing,” said Alejandro Barraza, a criminal defense and immigration attorney who has seen clients arrested after court appearances or avoid trial because they feared ICE. “Our clients are losing their rights to due process. Everyone is losing.”

Who Gets Kept From Court

Barraza said ICE arrested one client in October 2025 while he was driving home from a hearing at the Riverside County Hall of Justice. In December, another client was arrested while leaving the Rancho Cucamonga courthouse. A third pleaded guilty rather than go to trial, despite Barraza’s advice that the case was worth fighting, because the client feared ICE would arrest them.

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said courthouse arrests have long been barred because they’re unconstitutional and disrupt the rule of law. He said prosecutors have dropped serious criminal charges and jeopardized entire cases because victims and witnesses were too scared to testify at courthouses.

ICE arrests at or near courthouses began rising again after Trump took office in January 2025. A May 2025 ICE memo said agents could conduct “civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses” when they had credible information that people targeted for arrest would be at a specific location. In June 2025, ICE agents arrested two women outside a Los Angeles County courthouse after a hearing in a local criminal case. Similar incidents followed across the state.

California court officials have tracked arrests by federal agents and reported them to the Judicial Council of California. The records show 30 people taken into custody in June, 29 in July, 19 in August and 14 in September.

The Lawsuit—and Its Limits

Bonta’s lawsuit argues the arrests are arbitrary and capricious because they discourage participation in the state justice system. His office says they violate the Immigration and Nationality Act as Congress intended and interfere with California’s 10th Amendment rights to carry out its “core sovereign judicial and police functions.”

In June, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts in San Francisco struck down ICE’s expanded courthouse-arrest policies nationwide. The case involved immigration courthouses, but the ruling also covered state criminal courthouses, restoring earlier restrictions on civil immigration arrests in or near courthouses except in limited circumstances. The Trump administration is appealing.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law strengthening California’s protections for people traveling to, attending or leaving courthouses for lawful purposes. It extends protections to public ways within 1,000 feet of court facilities, while keeping an exception for arrests under a valid judicial warrant. Bonta said the law didn’t make the lawsuit unnecessary, partly because the administration believes “no state law applies to them.” This week, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a separate state law requiring federal immigration agents to display identification while working in California.

The legal contest marks another round in a two-way escalation of executive power and state lawsuits. Independent legal experts said presidents of both parties have increasingly used executive power, while state attorneys general have increasingly sued in response. During Trump’s first term, California, under then-Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, sued the administration more than 120 times over four years. Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration just over 100 times in four years.

Power Answering Power

Experts said Trump quickly began putting in place policies from his first term or outlined in the Project 2025 policy blueprint. With help from the Republican-controlled Congress, he appointed loyalists who advanced policies that less loyal agency heads might have rejected, prompting further legal challenges. Daniel Farber, a professor at UC Berkeley Law School, said the administration was “doing more aggressive things right off the starting block” and repeatedly targeting California.

Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, called many of California’s suits “legally meritorious,” citing “a whole lot of legal error” and overreach “facilitated by the lack of internal checks” from loyal agency heads. He also said he didn’t “appreciate having government using my tax dollars for what essentially are in many cases ideological lawsuits, even if meritorious,” adding that private litigants can and often do sue. He said he felt the same about many lawsuits Republican states brought against the Biden administration.

The White House has described Bonta’s lawsuits as baseless and misguided. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said Thursday that Bonta should stop “filing frivolous lawsuits” and focus on problems in his own state. Bis also said the administration had more than 25 Supreme Court victories and that its policies had been upheld as lawful. ICE has defended courthouse arrests as a “common sense” way to apprehend offenders where and when authorities know they will be.

Bonta said California would keep suing if Trump continued breaking the law in ways that hurt the state or its residents. His office has also challenged plans to end birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of immigrants, worldwide tariffs, National Guard deployments in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, and the withholding of billions of dollars in federal funding allocated to California by Congress.

The lawsuit count has reached 100. People deciding whether they can safely show up in court still face the consequences of enforcement power exercised at the courthouse.