WASHINGTON, D.C. - A federal court in Washington, D.C., today issued an order to enforce its own previous ruling halting the Trump administration’s policy and practice of arresting people for immigration violations in the District of Columbia without a warrant and without probable cause for escape risk.
In December 2025, the court issued a preliminary injunction ordering the Trump administration to stop enforcing its policy of making warrantless civil immigration arrests in D.C. without making individualized probable cause determinations that the person being arrested is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. The injunction was issued in response to a class action lawsuit brought by four local residents, and We Are CASA, in September, after federal agents spent weeks indiscriminately arresting people they perceived to be Latino throughout D.C.
The plaintiffs filed a motion to enforce in February, presenting evidence of several dozen arrests in which federal agents made no effort to obtain probable cause that a person was likely to escape or used perfunctory reasoning to justify arrests without a warrant. The plaintiffs filed a supplemental brief discussing in detail a memo issued to ICE personnel in January by senior ICE official Todd Lyons, misinterpreting the probable cause standard for escape risk and asking the court to order the defendants not to rely on the probable cause standard or analysis in the memo.
In today’s ruling, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted the plaintiffs’ motion and ordered that, “when conducting civil immigration arrests without a warrant in this District, defendants shall not rely on the probable cause standard or analytical approach set forth in the five-page memorandum from former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons[.]”
“The court has recognized that the Trump administration violated the preliminary injunction order. Today’s order reaffirms that the administration is not above the law,” said Aditi Shah, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, one of the attorneys who argued for the plaintiffs in a court hearing in March. “We will continue to defend the rights of people who live in, work in, and visit D.C., including our neighbors who are immigrants.”
“Immigration agents continue to skip crucial safeguards before arresting D.C. residents for immigration violations,” said Madeleine Gates, associate counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, another attorney who argued for the plaintiffs in the March court hearing. “We're pleased that the court has acted to protect our immigrant friends and neighbors in D.C.”
The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, American Civil Liberties Union, the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, We Are CASA, National Immigration Project, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and the law firm of Covington & Burling.
“These rampant, unlawful warrantless arrests have terrorized our communities, creating fear and instability for families across D.C. Parents are afraid to go to work, children worry their loved ones may not come home, and entire communities are forced to live with uncertainty,” said Shana Khader, deputy legal director for We Are CASA. “The government’s flagrant violation of the law has real human consequences, and the court today has sent a powerful message that the government cannot sidestep the law.”
In their filings on the motion to enforce, the plaintiffs presented documentation from the administration showing that federal agents misapplied the legal test for likelihood of escape. The documents also showed no effort by agents to determine if a person had ties to the community, such as family or employment.
“ICE leadership took a federal statute and wrote a memo telling officers to ignore most of it,” said Yulie Landan, staff attorney at the National Immigration Project. “The Lyons memo stripped community ties out of the probable cause analysis entirely, narrowed the meaning of escape risk past the breaking point, and handed agents a green light to arrest D.C. residents on sight. A federal court has now ordered the administration to stop relying on this mangled standard in D.C. The deeper problem is that ICE wrote it in the first place and pushed it out to officers across the country.”
“This opinion builds on the preliminary injunction to comprehensively reject ICE’s ‘arrest first, ask questions later’ policy,” said Austin Rose, managing attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. “It tells ICE to stop tearing our D.C. immigrant neighbors away from the communities they have helped build and of which they are an integral part.”
Today’s ruling grants the plaintiffs’ requested relief, ordering the administration not to follow the probable cause standard in the Lyons memo in the District.
More information about this case, including legal documents, is available here:
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