A rule requiring a warrant at one Ohio courthouse now tests the limits of federal immigration power

On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued a municipal court in Columbus, Ohio, over a rule that most Americans have never heard of and most courthouses in the country do not have. Local Rule 2.10, listed among the court's published local rules, says that nobody attending a hearing or otherwise conducting lawful business there can be subjected to a civil arrest inside the building or on its grounds — unless the arresting officer has a warrant signed by a judge. The Department of Justice calls that an unconstitutional attempt to obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The court's defenders call it a modest guarantee that people can walk into a courthouse without being seized before they walk out. The lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Ohio asks a federal judge to strike the rule down entirely, and it is only the latest entry in a rapidly expanding docket testing how far local courts can go to protect the people who appear before them.

The numbers behind the rule

Franklin County's Municipal Court adopted Rule 2.10 in March, after what local reporting describes as more than a year of public pressure following a string of arrests inside and around the courthouse. The Justice Department's own complaint puts the prior arrest count at a minimum of twelve people detained by immigration officers at the municipal court "in recent years," including, according to reporting from Columbus's NPR affiliate, people picked up for routine traffic violations while they were on the premises for unrelated hearings. Since the rule took effect, the government says, ICE has made zero civil arrests inside the courthouse — and has instead had to redirect "additional personnel, surveillance, vehicles, equipment, and overtime" toward arresting the same people elsewhere, arrests the department itself describes as less predictable and riskier for officers and bystanders alike. The complaint also cites two Columbus-area ICE officers hospitalized after violent encounters in the past three months, though it offers no further detail connecting those incidents to the courthouse rule specifically, according to court filings reviewed by Courthouse News Service. Notably, the lawsuit does not touch the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, a separate court in the same building complex that has adopted a substantially similar restriction of its own.

Part of a wider campaign

The Ohio suit did not arise in isolation. Attorney General Todd Blanche has directed the Civil Division to hunt for state and local rules that "facilitate violations of federal laws or impede lawful federal operations," and the department describes Tuesday's filing as the latest in a series that already reaches New York, Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, California, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. In Wisconsin, the department has gone after Milwaukee's ban on masked, unidentified federal officers with a nearly identical Supremacy Clause theory, laid out in a parallel complaint against the city. The throughline in each case is the same: a locality adopts a narrow, procedural rule aimed at how or where federal agents may act, and the department responds that any such rule, however modest, is void the moment it touches federal enforcement at all.

That theory has had a mixed reception in federal court this year. In June, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts found that ICE's own courthouse-arrest policies were themselves unlawful — "arbitrary and capricious" under the Administrative Procedure Act — and issued a nationwide injunction restoring older limits on arrests at immigration courts, a ruling described in detail by Courthouse News Service's account of that decision. That case addressed federal immigration courts rather than a municipal criminal docket like Franklin County's, but it establishes that courts have been willing to scrutinize the government's own justification for courthouse arrests just as skeptically as they scrutinize local restrictions on them.

The practical burden of this dispute falls first on immigrants who have ordinary business in Franklin County's courts — filing a protective order, appearing as a crime victim or witness, answering a traffic citation, finalizing a custody matter. Judges and court administrators nationwide have argued for years, across administrations, that the fear of arrest deters people from using the courts at all, which undermines the docket's basic function regardless of anyone's immigration status. Local government has a stake too: Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther has barred city resources from supporting federal immigration enforcement absent evidence of a crime since 2017, a policy this lawsuit does not challenge directly but plainly conflicts with in spirit. And the Justice Department has its own institutional interest, since a loss here would blunt a legal theory it is actively deploying against a growing list of cities and states, while a win would hand it a template to challenge courthouse-protection rules anywhere they exist.

The competing arguments

The government's public-safety case is not frivolous. Courthouses run people through metal detectors and bag searches before they get near a judge, which the department argues makes them safer places to take someone into custody than a workplace, a home or a roadside stop. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate framed the stakes in stark terms, saying the rule "obstructs federal law enforcement and facilitates evasion of federal law by dangerous criminal aliens, despite Congress's direction that federal agents detain and remove them."

Mayor Ginther's response captures the opposing view just as directly:

This lawsuit does nothing to make Columbus safer. ICE's immigration enforcement activities are unwelcome and unnecessary in our community — they spread fear, undermine trust, and make it harder for local law enforcement to keep people safe.

Both statements can be true at once, which is precisely the problem the lawsuit is designed to resolve by force rather than compromise. A courthouse is safer for the officer making an arrest; it is also, for exactly that reason, a place immigrants may now avoid altogether, including when they are victims of crime rather than targets of enforcement. The Justice Department's complaint does not engage with that second effect at all.

What the case should settle

Rule 2.10 does not purport to shield anyone from a lawfully issued judicial warrant, and it imposes no obstacle the federal government could not clear by asking a magistrate for one. That is a materially different posture than an outright ban on federal enforcement, and a federal judge in Columbus should weigh that distinction carefully rather than treating every local courthouse rule as constitutionally interchangeable with a state law nullifying federal authority outright. If the Supremacy Clause voids a rule this narrow, the same logic would seem to void the identical restriction already in place at Franklin County's Court of Common Pleas, which the department has so far left alone — an inconsistency the litigation will eventually have to confront. Whatever the district court decides, the case belongs on an expedited track: every month it drags on is a month in which immigrants either avoid Franklin County's courts out of fear or lose the narrow protection local judges tried to give them. A docket this consequential, for the people who depend on it most, does not benefit from delay.