If one of Trump’s disgraced agencies accuses the other of lying, which of them should be on-the-hook for legal repercussions? That’s one question of many after it was revealed in late March that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been flat-out lying about its authority to make immigration arrests (which frequently involved stalking, assaults and excessive violence) in and outside immigration court.
The scandal first came to light when former New York City comptroller Brad Lander posted to X, formerly twitter, about a letter sent by SDNY‘s Jay Clayton, informing all parties that ICE’s self-declared “justification” for courthouse detainment was false. Via Whitney Curry Wimbish for The American Prospect (emphasis mine):
ICE has been lying for more than a year about its authority to arrest people when they show up to their routine immigration court hearings, according to a letter the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York filed yesterday.
The letter by Jay Clayton says that ICE legal counsel told him and other SDNY attorneys that the memo they had been using to justify their courthouse arrests did not actually grant the authority they previously insisted it did. That memo, dated May [24], 2025, is titled ‘Civil Immigration Enforcement Actions in or Near Courthouses,’ commonly referred to as ‘2025 ICE Guidance.’ According to Clayton, it ‘does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review immigration courts.’
ICE and its goons, many of them anonymous with face coverings, relied on this memo’s “guidance” to stalk immigrants who were showing up to mandated court dates to comply with federal law.
Federal agents previously used the guidance to stalk immigrants for more than a year outside of immigration courts, lingering in the halls, grabbing people as they exit their hearings, and disappearing them into federal detention, even when judges say they have credible asylum claims. Once in the system, ICE then moves prisoners around the country to stop them from meeting with lawyers.
Despite having outlandish arrest quotas set by the likes of Steve Miller, ICE stopped publishing data just before Trump’s second regime kicked off. As such, it’s hard to quantify how many people got swept up in ICE and DHS’ objectively hysterical rush to detain migrants. In Massachusetts alone there were more than 600 arrests inside or near immigration court, and that’s just one state.
At the start of Regime 2, Trump invoked an obscure law (and flouted a court order) to start superpowering deportations. So ICE getting busted lying about justification (presumably to meet demands placed on them by disgraced politicians) has notable legal heft and will likely come up in future legal cases.
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
The question we have to ask, which I believe is important in a legal sense, is whether or not ICE’s administrators knew the justification for courthouse arrests was bunk. That’s an answerable question. So it’s not surprising that the tenor of Clayton’s letter feels to me like a lawyerly version of “sorry about these guys being freakin’ idiots.”
Acting outside the law as-written is the cornerstone of Donald’s disgraced Regime 2. They have famously blocked congressional oversight of detention centers; assaulted and arrested members of congress trying to do that oversight, including aforementioned Lander; stopped reporting mandated detention figures; and essentially broke a significant amount of laws in the process while falsely claiming to be “defending the law.”
I will continue following this story since I believe, as the kids say, “it has legs.” Watch this space.
