'ICE Has Been Lying for a Year' About Being Allowed to Make Courthouse Arrests

US congressional candidate Brad Lander is demanding a congressional investigation and civil rights actions on behalf of hundreds of people who have been "illegally abducted" at immigration courts across the country after the US Department of Justice admitted it has been relying on a lie put forward by federal immigration officials as it defended agents' arrests at courthouses.

Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote a memo on Wednesday to a judge who last September ruled that courthouse arrests could continue, based on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) guidance which indicated that "ICE officers or agents may conduct civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses when they have credible information" that a person eligible for deportation would be present at a court.

That guidance from May 27 of last year "does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review immigration courts," reads Clayton's letter.

"The undersigned were specifically informed by ICE that the 2025 ICE Guidance applied to immigration courthouse arrests," Clayton wrote. "This regrettable error appears to have occurred because of agency attorney error."

The letter represented a "jaw-dropping admission" by the DOJ, said New York University law professor and Just Security editor Ryan Goodman.

The ICE guidance has been used to underpin numerous arrests at courthouses for more than a year—those of the husband of Monica Moreta-Galarza, who was violently thrown to the ground by an ICE agent when she protested the detention at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City; Dylan Lopez Contreras, a Bronx high school student who was arrested when he showed up for a legal asylum hearing last May and was only released this month; and others across the country whose names and stories haven't made national headlines.

Clayton said his office became aware of the far-reaching error on Tuesday when it received an email issuing a "reminder that the May 27, 2025 Guidance does not apply to Executive Office for Immigration Review (Immigration) courts, regardless of their location.”

The US attorney wrote that Castel's opinion from last September, in which the judge ruled ICE's guidance clearly allowed arrests at immigration courts, "will need to be reconsidered and re-briefed for the court to adjudicate Plaintiffs’ APA [Administrative Procedure Act] claims against ICE on the merits."

Clayton issued the filing as part of an ongoing case in which immigrant rights groups sued over the Trump administration's arrests at routine immigration court hearings.

That case, said Goodman, is now one of more than 90 that Just Security has been tracking in which a court either "determined the Trump administration submitted false information or the administration admitted it."

Amy Belsher, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, told NBC News that the revelation about the ICE guidance is "yet again another example of ICE’s brazen disregard for the lives of immigrants in this country."

"It is now clearer than ever that there is no justification for ambushing and arresting people who are showing up to court," Belsher said.

Lander, the former city comptroller who is running to represent New York's 10th Congressional District, called Clayton's filing "a genuine bombshell, even by Trumpian standards."

"ICE has been lying for a year," said Lander in a video posted on social media. "Not just to you and me and to asylum seekers, but to courts and to prosecutors."

"Courthouse arrests must stop immediately," he said. "It was time to abolish ICE a year ago. It surely is today."