For over two years, California’s Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye has regularly criticized federal immigration officers for making arrests at the state’s courthouses. Recently, the Legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation responding to that concern. Assembly Bill 668 prohibits the “civil arrest [of a person] in a courthouse while attending a court proceeding or having legal business in the courthouse.”
Legislative reports state the bill “responds, at least in part, to the increasing use of ‘civil arrests’ by federal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at California courthouses” and reference a 2017 letter the Chief Justice sent to the U.S. Attorney General. The letter criticized the “stalking [of] undocumented immigrants in our courthouses” by federal immigration agents and said that “[c]ourthouses should not be used as bait in the necessary enforcement of our country’s immigration laws.”
A similar bill in 2017 didn’t make it out of the Legislature.
