In Ohio case, federal judge says warrantless ICE arrests are illegal, but denies motion to stop them

One federal official “testified that almost all of his agency’s arrests are warrantless,” the judge’s order said.

Then she dismissed the case because she said the plaintiffs didn’t do an adequate job of showing the Trump administration is likely to keep making such arrests. She made the ruling even as ICE insists it doesn’t need warrants.

Groups defending the immigrants who brought the case were not pleased.

“The opinion from the court confirms what we already knew: ICE violated the law and arrested our clients illegally,” said Angela Plummer, executive director of Community and Refugee Immigration Services, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs.

“Unfortunately, we are living in a world where documented human rights violations alone are insufficient to compel court action to stop them.”

The case was brought in March by four people who argued warrantless immigration arrests were so common that the case should be a class action and include all similarly situated people.

As the Trump administration tries to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day, critics say it’s run roughshod over due process, sweeping up people who are here legally and even some citizens.

In her ruling, Judge Morrison agreed with the plaintiffs that before making arrests, ICE agents need to have both probable cause to believe a person is in violation of immigration law and is likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained.

“Upon a fulsome review of the record in this case, it is clear that (ICE agents) have, in some instances, unlawfully arrested and detained non-citizens in Ohio without a warrant and without a probable cause determination of their likelihood of escape,” Morrison’s ruling said. “Some of the accounts offered by Plaintiffs and (the class) they wish to represent about how individual agents effectuated arrests deeply trouble the Court.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case was Moises Javier Aguilar Peralta, 38, who came to Ohio from Honduras in 2023, sought asylum and got a work permit, Social Security number, and a driver’s license. 

On Dec. 18, as he walked out of a Columbus Home Depot with materials he needed for work, four masked men in civilian clothes stopped him. When he told them he had an active asylum case, the agents told him it wasn’t valid and arrested him, the suit said.

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They didn’t ask him any questions to determine the legality of his presence in the country or to determine if he was a flight risk, it said.

As with the other plaintiffs, Peralta was held — and unable to support his family — for weeks and lived in a state of terror after his release, his lawyers said.

As of late March, around 670 immigrants in Ohio were in ICE detention.

“Countless of these individuals were arrested and detained without a warrant and without any pre-arrest, individualized determination of probable cause,” the plaintiffs said.

They asked Morrison to certify the case as a class action and order the government to stop making improper warrantless arrests.

Judge Morrison rejected the request, saying the four original plaintiffs didn’t adequately show they were likely to be re-arrested. But if the class were certified, re-arrests among that much-larger group would have been much more likely.

Morrison acknowledged the pressure Trump is putting on ICE to make thousands of arrests a day. She also heard from U.S. Border Patrol Acting Deputy Patrol Agent in Charge Steven Vorholt.

“Agent Vorholt, a supervisor who oversees and evaluates the field operations of USBP agents and their supervisors, testified that almost all of his agency’s arrests are warrantless,” Judge Morrison wrote.

In addition, she acknowledged that other courts have found that federal agents are making illegal, warrantless immigration arrests. 

And ICE’s own website flatly says its agents don’t need warrants to arrest people they believe are in violation of immigration law.

“ICE does not need judicial warrants to make arrests,” it says. “Like all other law enforcement officers, ICE officers and agents can initiate consensual encounters and speak with people, briefly detain aliens when they have reasonable suspicion that the aliens are illegally present in the United States, and arrest people they believe are illegal aliens.”

Even so, Judge Morrison said the plaintiffs fell short because they didn’t show federal immigration arrests are always warrantless or that the agencies have a written policy to act illegally. She cited internal documents saying agents needed to get warrants in cases where escape wasn’t imminent.

“In this case, Plaintiffs have not shown that all of Defendants’ agents always make warrantless arrests without determining the non-citizen arrestee’s likelihood of escape,” she wrote.

“Nor have Plaintiffs shown that either ICE or CBP adopted a written policy of unlawful conduct. Although the Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown for jurisdictional purposes that Defendants authorized their agents, through an unofficial custom or practice, to make unlawful warrantless arrests in Ohio, Plaintiffs have not convinced the Court that Defendants are sufficiently likely to subject them to another arrest under that practice.”

Freda Levinson, the chief legal officer of ACLU of Ohio, found a partial victory in the ruling.

“This ruling is deeply disappointing and frustrating, but it also recognizes that federal agents are wantonly conducting haphazard arrests in clear violation of the dictates and the Immigration and Nationality Act,” she said in a written statement.

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