California's 100th Suit: Courthouse Arrests Chill Justice

California sued the Trump administration for the 100th time in under two years on Thursday, challenging U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of people accused of civil immigration violations at or near state courthouses. State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said longstanding rules bar those arrests because they’re unconstitutional and disrupt the rule of law and the rights of victims, witnesses, defendants and others involved in court proceedings.

The damage, Bonta said, is already visible. “We’ve seen serious criminal charges dropped and entire cases jeopardized because victims and witnesses are too scared to come to the courthouse to testify,” he said. “Our justice system cannot function this way.”

Who Pays the Price

Alejandro Barraza, a criminal defense and immigration attorney, has seen it happen to his own clients. In October 2025, ICE arrested one while the client drove home from a hearing at the Riverside County Hall of Justice. In December, agents arrested another as the client left the Rancho Cucamonga courthouse. A third pleaded guilty rather than go to trial, although Barraza advised that the case was worth fighting, because the client feared ICE would arrest them.

“The victims are losing,” Barraza said. “Our clients are losing their rights to due process. Everyone is losing.”

Arrests at or near courthouses began rising again after Trump took office in January 2025. An ICE memo issued in May 2025 said agents could conduct “civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses when they have credible information that leads them to believe the targeted alien(s) is or will be present 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.

Bonta’s lawsuit argues that courthouse arrests are arbitrary and capricious because they discourage people from taking part in the state’s justice system. His office said the arrests 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.” During Trump’s first term, then-California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye called the arrests “disruptive, shortsighted and counterproductive.”

Courts and Lawmakers Respond

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

Arrests haven’t stopped. Since the ruling, California court officials have tracked federal agents’ arrests and reported them to the Judicial Council of California: 30 people were taken into custody in June, 29 in July, 19 in August and 14 in September.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law strengthening state 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 new law didn’t make the lawsuit unnecessary, partly because the administration believes “no state law applies to them.” He also cited courts that have sided with California in some cases, though the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this week blocked a state law requiring federal immigration agents to display identification while working in the state.

The White House Pushback

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. It has called Bonta’s lawsuits baseless and misguided. In August, Bonta said his lawsuits had saved California more than $200 billion, largely by reversing Trump cuts to federal funding for the state. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson then urged Bonta to stop “filing frivolous lawsuits” and “focus on addressing problems in his own state.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis repeated that line Thursday. “The reality is, with well over 25 Supreme Court victories, the administration’s policies have been consistently upheld as lawful, despite some lower courts issuing an unprecedented number of lawless injunctions,” Bis said. ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency has defended courthouse arrests as a “common sense” way to apprehend offenders where and when authorities know they will be.

California courthouse accounts tell a different story: dropped charges, frightened witnesses and a defendant who gave up the right to a trial.

A Pattern Beyond One Policy

Bonta’s office has also challenged administration plans to end birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of immigrants, worldwide tariffs, the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, and the withholding of billions of dollars in federal funding Congress allocated to California.

Independent legal experts identified several reasons for the rise in lawsuits. 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, a current gubernatorial candidate, sued more than 120 times over four years. Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, now a Republican candidate for Senate, sued the Biden administration just over 100 times in four years.

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

Bonta called the 100 lawsuits a “sobering milestone.” “It was a shock and awe,” he said. “It was flood the zone. It was trying to overwhelm with speed and volume, and we kept pace every time.” He said California would keep suing if Trump kept breaking the law in ways that hurt the state or its residents.

Why This Matters: Courthouses are where ordinary people go to testify against abusers, defend themselves and ask the law for protection. When fear keeps victims and witnesses at home, cases collapse, and the people the justice system is meant to protect lose first. California accounts describe defendants giving up trials and prosecutors watching serious charges fall away. The dispute also tests how much power states have to defend their court systems against federal enforcement, and whether courts can restrain an executive branch that, in Bonta’s and some experts’ view, faces few internal checks. Even a legal scholar skeptical of the lawsuits’ cost called many of them meritorious. The appeal of Judge Pitts’s ruling will help decide whether access to a courtroom depends on immigration status.