ICE Publishes Courthouse Enforcement Policy

ICE has published a Directive clarifying its policy on immigration enforcement actions.  It affirms ICE’s plans to continue conducting enforcement actions at courthouses, stating that “ICE’s enforcement activities in these same courthouses are wholly consistent with longstanding law enforcement practices, nationwide. ”  Consistent with signals that ICE uses courthouse arrests as a form of retaliation against jurisdictions that have adopted policies against cooperating with immigration authorities, it claims that “courthouse arrests are often necessitated by the unwillingness of jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE in the transfer of custody of aliens from their prisons and jails.”

With respect to “[a]liens encountered during a civil immigration enforcement action inside a courthouse, such as family members or friends accompanying the target alien to court appearances or serving as a witness in a proceeding,” the Directive states that such persons “will not be subject to civil immigration enforcement action.”  It adds a noteworthy caveat, though, stating that such a nonenforcement policy applies only “absent special circumstances, such as where the individual poses a threat to public safety or interferes with ICE’s enforcement actions.”

For more on ICE courthouse arrests, see Christopher Lasch’s essay, A Common-Law Privilege to Protect State and Local Courthouses During the Crimmigration Crisis, Yale L. J. Forum (forthcoming), or Cesar Cuahtemoc Garcia Hernandez’s New York Times op-ed, “ICE’s Courthouse Arrests Undercut Democracy” (Nov. 26, 2017).

-JKoh