A federal judge in San Francisco just halted the Trump administration’s policy of arresting migrants at immigration courthouses—everywhere in the country, for everyone. On June 23, 2026, Judge P. Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California issued a 71-page ruling in Pablo Sequen v. Albarran vacating three ICE courthouse-arrest policies and a separate waiver that had extended short-term detention from the longstanding 12-hour limit to 72 hours. The ruling applies nationwide.
There’s one problem. The Supreme Court already told district courts they can’t do this.
Well, almost.
In Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025), a 6-3 Supreme Court majority held that universal injunctions—orders blocking federal policy against everyone, not just the parties before the court—”likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority. The statutory anchor was the Judiciary Act of 1789; nothing like a universal injunction existed in English courts of chancery at the founding, so district courts can’t issue them now.
Judge Pitts anticipated that argument and rejected it. His ruling rests on APA vacatur, Section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act, which directs courts to “hold unlawful and set aside” agency action that is arbitrary and capricious.
Pitts found that ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest guidance was “an irrational departure” from prior rules. He concluded that because the challenged policies were nationwide agency actions, nationwide vacatur was the appropriate remedy. CASA, he held, addressed injunctions, a different legal vehicle.
He’s not wrong about the distinction, but he may be wrong about the result.
The APA’s “set aside” language has been understood to reach agency-wide policies. That reading has majority support among circuits, and some support on the Supreme Court itself; Justice Kavanaugh has defended it, and Chief Justice Roberts called the government’s contrary position “radical” at oral argument.
The CASA majority explicitly left APA remedies intact. Pitts isn’t operating in defiance of CASA—he’s operating in the gap the Court left open, then walking through it at speed. But the practical result is identical to what CASA was designed to prevent.
The structural problem is the same regardless of the procedural vehicle. When a single district judge can vacate a national executive policy for 330 million people, the forum-shopping incentives are obvious. The Northern District of California, the Southern District of New York, and the District of Maryland have become preferred venues for challenges to Republican administrations for the same reason plaintiffs choose the Fifth Circuit in Texas when challenging Democratic ones.
Congress has two pending proposals to address this. The Judicial Relief Clarification Act would limit non-party relief in federal courts to representative-capacity suits under Rule 23. The Restraining Judicial Insurrectionist Act would require three-judge panels for any suit seeking equitable relief against executive branch action, eliminating the single-judge choke point. Neither bill has reached a committee vote, let alone the floor. Both have sat in Senate Judiciary since the spring of 2025.
The equal-opportunity argument is crucial. The Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan was vacated by a district court on APA grounds. The Obama EPA’s Waters of the United States rule was set aside by district courts across multiple circuits. APA vacatur is a weapon that points in all directions. The question isn’t which administration it’s aimed at today, but what the rule should be for every administration, permanently.
The Founders designed three separate branches to prevent any one institution from accumulating the authority to make, execute, and void law simultaneously. Article III courts review executive action for constitutional compliance. They weren’t designed to function as a standing veto on national policy, one summary judgment motion at a time. A single district judge in California overriding national executive policy for every American is a structural problem the Constitution’s design was built to prevent.
The Supreme Court drew the line on injunctions. It left the APA question open. That question is now running at full speed through the Northern District of California.
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