When in 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increases its courthouse enforcement activities, issues of immigrant rights, and access to justice become even more acute.
This move on the part of the agency of arresting immigrants in and around immigration courts causes significant interference to the efforts of immigrants to participate in the legal system of the United States appropriately. Although the strategy is informed by enforcement priorities, it has its far-seated negative implications reflecting the deterrence of legal compliance, the loss of trust in institutions and the serious due-process considerations. The new level of ICE presence has put courthouses in the position of uncertainty due to the fact that ICE agents often appear in plain clothes or disguised, which makes fears of many immigrants, including lawful residents and asylum seekers, inevitable.
Arrests Surge In Major Cities
And no city has a more apparent shift in arrests than New York City where arrests counts have skyrocketed. The number of arrests increased significantly, too, with a total of 181 arrests at immigration court facilities in the three-week period between late May and early June 2025 beating the 11 arrests during the same period a year earlier. The surge of ICE-related courthouse arrests has increased by nearly 14-fold in New York, a fallout that experts attribute to a conscious and undertaken systematic effort.
Many of the people that were arrested were not fugitives, nor were they convicted criminals; the people that were arrested were individuals in scheduled hearings, filing an application, or accompanying a relative. Murad Awawdeh, the president of the New York Immigration Coalition, testified as follows during a public hearing,
“These tactics undermine trust in the justice system and discourage individuals from exercising their legal rights.”
Legal service providers have attested to this fear causing an increase in no-show rates to court dates, as the immigrants calculate the risk of arrest against the value of getting legal remedies.
Disproportionate Impact On Non-Criminals
As opposed to the public rhetoric of ICE that arrests involve the incarceration of dangerous people, internal agency records show that 70 percent of people arrested at courthouses had no criminal convictions. A large portion were apprehended during routine appearances, with no warning and often without legal representation.
According to immigration judges and data from the Deportation Data Project, only a small fraction of detainees secured counsel before removal proceedings began. At a recent immigration policy forum, David Hausman, the project’s faculty director, said: “ICE’s courthouse presence creates a chilling effect that disrupts the fairness of immigration proceedings.” His study shows that with an increased number of arrests in the courthouses, the fewer cases are attended to in the courts hence a vicious cycle of postponed justice occurs.
When the fears become more superior to the legal procedure, the justice system stops acting as an impartial field, but as the instrument of intimidation.
Policy Shifts And Legal Debate
The contemporary strategy of ECE is largely connected with the overturning of former directives that limited the opportunities to arrest people in sensitive places such as courthouses. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contends that renewed strategy provides consistency in enforcing and ensuring the safety of people. However, the opponents argue that this bypasses important constitutional safeguards.
Particularly, some arrests have been conducted by agents in tactical gear, without warrants and in the presence of children or vulnerable persons, which proves to be an ethical and legal concern. Critics claim that these strategies would not conform to the spirit, at least, of due process, and judicial independence.
Street lawyer Mario Nawfal put the matter succinctly on social media:
“The courthouse should be a sanctuary for justice, not a hunting ground for ICE agents.”
His widely shared post reflects growing unease over the transformation of legal spaces into zones of fear.
Detention And Alternatives
Alongside increased courthouse arrests, the ICE detainee population surged to nearly 60,000 by mid-2025. However, the majority of these detainees had little or no criminal history. Although alternatives to detention, such as electronic monitoring and check-ins, are in place for some, the aggressive use of courthouse enforcement has continued to dominate the agency’s strategy.
Alternatives to detention mean little when arrests are carried out in spaces where immigrants are legally obligated to appear—such tactics blur the line between enforcement and entrapment.
Social Integration And Civic Participation
The wider context of these courthouse practices of ICE has to do with the fabric of immigrant communities. The threat of arrest now influences and determines whether victims report wrongdoings, come to custody hearings or even get protection orders. The possibility of being locked up merely by going to a courthouse undermines the social compact that exists between immigrant populations and those institutions that are responsible to protect them.
Legal writers caution that once civic trust is compromised, the result is a less safe rather than more safe community. It is also in opposition to the established American legal traditions according to which access to a court is a core right.
Justice Or Jeopardy?
As 2025 moves on, ICE courthouse arrests still raise a heated discussion among policymakers, lawyers, and human rights advocates. Whereas DHS and ICE claim that these efforts are legal and unavoidable, the objections involve the belief that the price to be paid regarding civil liberties and trust of the people is too high.
The court ought to be a safe place but in a nation governed by the slogan that every person is entitled to due process, the courtroom has proven to be not a safe zone but a dangerous ground. This change in tack in enforcement has put immigrants in a legislative bind: go with the system and face possible arrest, or avoid it and face possible mandatory deportation by default.
In the absence of federal protection, judicial checks, and restrictions placed on enforcement in courts of law, the plight of immigrants in 2025 would still be one of a penal system that does not punish people who violate the law, but those who only attempt to abide by it.
