The Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit on behalf of individual plaintiffs and not-for-profit organizations Make the Road New York, the Urban Justice Center, Sanctuary for Families, The Door, and the New York Immigration Coalition to challenge the legality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) policy of carrying out federal immigration arrests of noncitizens in and around New York State courthouses without judicial warrants. Known victims of ICE’s courthouse arrests included criminal defendants, parents appearing in child support matters, as well as survivors of gender-based violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, and other crimes. In addition to these direct harms, ICE’s practices created an atmosphere of fear that kept countless noncitizens from accessing New York State courts both affirmatively and defensively. We argued that ICE’s policy violated the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the New York State common law privilege against civil detention while attending and travelling to and from court, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

In September 2020, a judge in the Southern District of New York denied the Government’s motion to dismiss all but our Sixth Amendment claim. The Court agreed that New York law includes a common law privilege against courthouse arrests that is implicitly incorporated into the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, and also that ICE’s courthouse arrests, as articulated in our complaint, violated the Petition Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Our lawsuit was stayed in 2020, as a related case brought by the New York Attorney General and the Brooklyn District Attorney was appealed to the Second Circuit. See State of New York v. U.S. Immigration & Customs Enf’t, 466 F. Supp. 3d 439 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). Both suits were eventually dismissed without prejudice during the Biden administration, which discontinued the Trump-era courthouse arrest policy.