A federal judge said Thursday that instructions given to immigration enforcement officers to make civil immigrant arrests without warrants do not meet probable cause standards and should not be used as guidance, putting a legal brake on a federal agency that has been sweeping up noncitizens under a law-enforcement surge ordered by President Donald Trump.
Who Gets Targeted First
The case centers on civil immigration arrests in the District, where defendants were told not to rely on the probable cause standard or analytical approach set out in a five-page memorandum from the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington, D.C., said Thursday that the instructions failed to tell officers to assess a person’s connections to the community before deciding that person is a flight risk and should be taken into custody immediately.
That missing step matters because the people at the bottom of the enforcement chain are the ones who pay for decisions made at the top. The lawsuit was filed in 2025 by four noncitizens and the nonprofit organization CASA in Washington, challenging arrests during immigration sweeps by the federal agency. Those sweeps were part of a law-enforcement surge ordered by President Donald Trump, the kind of top-down operation that turns communities into hunting grounds and paperwork into handcuffs.
What the Court Ordered
Howell continued a preliminary injunction she issued in December and said the instructions should not be used as guidance. In her order, she said that when conducting civil immigration arrests without a warrant in the District, defendants shall not rely on the probable cause standard or analytical approach set forth in the memorandum from the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Howell also approved another request by the plaintiffs seeking more records to help explain how the policy will be implemented. At the same time, she rejected some of their arguments and said the government had adhered to her preliminary injunction order on some issues. The ruling leaves the machinery of enforcement under scrutiny, but it also shows how much of this system runs on internal memos, shifting standards, and the quiet assumption that officers can decide who gets seized first and asked questions later.
The People Push Back
Madeleine Gates, associate counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said, “We got what we were asking for essentially.” She said the ruling “reaffirms that federal agents have to comply with the law. They do not get a pass in doing immigration enforcement.” Gates also said, “This particular case is all about what happens at the outset, before the arrest is made.”
That focus on the outset is where the violence of bureaucracy often hides: in the standard, the memo, the threshold, the moment before the cage door closes. The plaintiffs’ request for more records suggests that even when a court intervenes, the public still has to pry information out of the apparatus to understand how the policy will actually be carried out.
The Agency’s Answer
The Department of Homeland Security responded to questions about Thursday’s order in an email saying, “ICE has authority for lawful arrests.” The email said, “Law enforcement officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” and added, “The Supreme Court has already vindicated us on these practices.”
That response lays out the familiar script from the enforcement state: authority first, legality second, and the courts as the final seal on practices that already hit the most vulnerable hardest. The judge’s order does not end the machinery, but it does expose how much of it depends on guidance that failed to account for the people being swept up in the first place.