Judge Says DHS Violated Order on Warrantless Immigration Arrests

The Trump administration violated a court order barring federal immigration agents from making arrests in the nation’s capital without warrants, a Washington federal judge held.

Senior Judge Beryl Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia found Thursday that a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo providing guidance to immigration agents on when to arrest someone without a warrant “does not properly instruct law enforcement officers to comply” with her earlier court order restricting warrantless arrests.

She found the memo gave officers a “flawed” definition of what constitutes an “escape risk,” when evaluating if an immigrant may be arrested without a warrant. The memo tells officers to consider if an individual is “likely to remain at the scene of the encounter,” but doesn’t mention if the person could be found elsewhere to be arrested later with a warrant, such as at home or work.

The memo also “simply ignores” the requirement that arresting officers consider the extent of a person’s ties to the community when determining if they’re likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained, Howell said. The judge noted that “many” immigration officers have arrested people without asking any questions about community ties.

Though Howell rejected some of the other challenges to the ICE memo, she said the issues the memo does have leave her with “no alternative but to prohibit reliance on the memorandum in its entirety.”

The ruling is a win for the American Civil Liberties Union of DC. It sued the administration in September, claiming federal agents had been “indiscriminately arresting” Washington residents perceived to be Latino without a warrant. The suit followed a surge in federal immigration enforcement in Washington last year.

Aditi Shah, staff attorney with the advocacy organization, said in a statement that the order reaffirms that the government isn’t above the law. “We will continue to defend the rights of people who live in, work in, and visit D.C., including our neighbors who are immigrants,” Shah said.

Howell ordered the federal government in December not to arrest anyone in Washington for civil immigration offenses without an administrative warrant, unless the government determined, following an individual assessment, that the person was likely to flee before a warrant could be obtained.

However, attorneys for those arrested returned to court months later and alleged that agents were continuing to arrest people without an administrative warrant and without sufficiently considering if they were likely to escape first, in violation of the December order.

They pointed to records produced by the government for 33 warrantless arrests in which they said the officer didn’t properly address escape risk. They also took issue with the ICE memo, issued after her court ruling, that instructed officers to evaluate that risk based on whether someone is “unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location.”

During a hearing in March, Howell expressed alarm at the lengthy periods arrested immigrants spent in detention without bond hearings, a result of a policy change by the administration to submit more immigrants to mandatory detention. The judge also said some arrest scenarios presented by the parties were “disturbing, to say the least.”

Howell’s ruling follows increasing scrutiny of the administration’s compliance with court orders.

Federal judges have scolded government lawyers handling a deluge of immigration detention cases for missing deadlines or releasing immigrants. Another federal judge in Washington found last month that the government violated his court order by reinstating restrictions on Pentagon press access, after he struck down an earlier version of the policy.

The case is Escobar Molina v. DHS, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-03417, 5/7/26.