The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is in service of an authoritarian and white supremacist vision. The ACLU is fighting back.
In California and across the U.S., immigrants show up to court for mandatory immigration hearings, as immigration laws require them to do. Under President Trump, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been lying in wait to ambush and arrest them, often moments after they leave the courtroom.
Overnight, the Trump administration turned courthouses into traps, ripping individuals from their families and disappearing them to inhumane detention centers. That has left asylum seekers and other immigrants seeking a legal pathway to remain in the United States with an impossible choice: appear in court and risk detention and deportation without due process, or skip a mandatory hearing and lose their immigration case by default.
In August 2025, the ACLU of Northern California joined the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and other legal partners in court to stop the Trump administration’s policy of illegal courthouse arrests. We filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of asylum seekers arrested after attending their hearings and other immigrants who had upcoming court dates and reason to fear the same fate.
In Pablo Sequen v. Albarran, we argued that federal officials violated the law when they abruptly rescinded prior policies preventing ICE from arresting immigrants at immigration courthouses. Those prior policies correctly recognized that allowing courthouse arrests would have a significant “chilling effect” by deterring people from appearing for their own mandatory hearings. As part of this case, we also challenged ICE’s decision to waive its own 12-hour limit on detention in temporary holding facilities — a safeguard abandoned in service of the administration’s arbitrary quota of 3,000 daily arrests. In December 2025, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cease all arrests at immigration courts in Northern California.
In October 2025, we filed Garro Pinchi v. Noem to stop ICE’s new, unlawful policy of re-arresting people the government had already released while their cases proceeded — people DHS itself had determined posed no flight risk and no threat to public safety. Judge Pitts ordered a halt to that practice as well.
“Arbitrarily re-arresting people who have already been deemed eligible for release is cruel, baseless, and upends any expectation that people will be treated fairly in our legal system,” said Bree Bernwanger, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “This is especially true when people are re-arrested at mandatory court hearings or check-in appointments. It’s a cruel bait-and-switch with life-changing consequences.”
The courthouse arrests are part of an orchestrated campaign by the Trump administration to punish migrants, strip people of opportunities for lawful immigration status, and use coercion to achieve mass deportation without due process. It is nothing short of an attempt to dictate, by policy and by force, who belongs in this country. The overwhelming majority of people swept up by ICE and Border Patrol are Latinos and other people of color.
Trump has employed a barrage of tactics to achieve his authoritarian and white supremacist vision. He is attempting to gut birthright citizenship, the post-Civil War constitutional guarantee that every person born on American soil is a citizen. In January 2026, the Trump administration banned visas for nationals from 75 countries, including many African, Latin American and majority Muslim countries.
At the same time, he granted asylum to white Afrikaners, descendants of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, claiming they are the victims of “white genocide.” Trump has relentlessly demonized countries like Haiti with Black populations, while calling for more immigrants from Sweden and Norway.
The message could not be clearer.
The deployment of state power to marginalize and displace and exclude people of color is not an exception in the course of American history. Long before Trump, the federal government forcibly removed Indigenous nations from their lands, enforced fugitive slave acts, and limited naturalization to “free white persons.” The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred an entire nationality from entry and naturalization and remained law for 60 years. During the Great Depression, and again in 1954, officials “repatriated” or deported well over one million people of Mexican descent. Hundreds of thousands were U.S. citizens, including many children. During World War II, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into prison camps—not because of any evidence of disloyalty, but solely because of their national origin.
In each instance, the government used law to make exclusion appear orderly and legitimate. For more than 100 years, the ACLU has fought to uphold the principle that constitutional rights do not disappear because the government declares an emergency.
During World War II, the ACLU of Northern California represented Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who refused to leave his home to report to an incarceration center. Although Korematsu v. United States initially upheld the government’s position that it had the authority to imprison Japanese-Americans under wartime necessity, our lawsuit preserved a historic record of the truth and proved that Korematsu’s incarceration was driven by racial prejudice. Decades later, the federal government vacated his conviction and issued a formal apology — proof that legal resistance, even if at the time it results in a court loss, can ultimately help reshape history.
“The Constitution affords every person in this country due process, regardless of how they look or where they were born,” said Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. “Our vision is of an inclusive democracy that adheres to these rights for every person. That’s what we fight for.”
Today, the ACLU of Northern California is defending immigrants’ rights on multiple fronts:
- Warrantless Sweeps and Racial Profiling: In Kern County, Border Patrol agents swept through farmworker towns, stopping residents without warrants and instead relying solely on race and appearance to detain them. The ACLU Foundations of Northern California, Southern California, and San Diego & Imperial Counties secured a temporary injunction halting those stops. The court ruling reaffirmed that the Fourth Amendment protecting individuals from unreasonable searches does not have a carve-out for immigration enforcement. The federal government appealed the injunction and The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in April.
- Temporary Protected Status: The ACLU filed suit against the administration’s termination of TPS for Venezuelan, Salvadoran, and Haitian communities as unlawful and racially motivated. The conditions in these individuals’ countries, which led the government to grant them humanitarian protections, have not changed. This was a Trump administration decision designed to remove hundreds of thousands of people who had lived in the United States legally, contributed to their communities, and done nothing wrong. In April, we will be at the Supreme Court to defend TPS.
- Birthright Citizenship: When the administration issued an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil, it attacked a guarantee written in the Constitution since 1868. The ACLU joined a broad coalition of civil rights organizations to file a lawsuit challenging the administration’s claim that a president can rewrite the Constitution by executive order. That case, Barbra v. Trump, was argued by ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang at the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1, 2026.
The Trump administration is counting on silence—banking on people to look away as courthouses become traps, families are torn apart, and the constitutional guarantees that define this democracy are dismantled one executive order and one policy at a time.
Yet many of us want a humane and fair immigration system that treats people with dignity and respect, not one that violates due process.
Every lawsuit we file, every injunction we win, every constitutional line we hold depends on our members who refuse to look away.
This is the moment. Not next year. Not after the next election. The ACLU of Northern California is in court and in communities fighting these battles every single day. Stand with us.
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