Thawing ICE

Some good news on immigration enforcement for the first time in what feels like a very long time comes in the form of two court orders restricting Trump administration policies and a body cam announcement from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem.

The first court order came Monday morning, in a case filed against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by Rep. Joe Neguse (D–Colo.) and 12 other Democratic members of Congress. Their complaint centered on a new rule requiring members of Congress to give seven days’ notice before they could enter an ICE detention facility.

The Trump administration first issued an advance-notice policy last June, saying that members of Congress must provide three days’ notice before being allowed entry into ICE field offices and 24 hours’ notice in order to enter an ICE detention facility. Twelve Democrats—all of whom said they were blocked from unannounced visits to immigration facilities—sued, noting that under a rider attached to the DHS’ annual funding bill, they have the right to conduct oversight visits to DHS facilities without prior notice. In December, Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia temporarily barred enforcement of the advance-notice rule.

Then, on January 8, Noem issued a memo saying members of Congress must provide seven days’ notice to enter immigration detention facilities. (If at first you don’t succeed….) So, Democrats sued again, and here we are.

In yesterday’s ruling, Cobb once again issued a temporary stay on enforcing the prior notice requirement. “The Court has already found that DHS’s promulgation, implementation, and enforcement of a nearly identical requirement qualified as Defendants ‘us[ing]‘ funds ‘to prevent’ Members of Congress from entering facilities as is prohibited,” she wrote.

Noem’s rationale for the new memo was that it was OK because the DHS would only enforce it using funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and not the annual appropriations bill. But “evidence in the form of testimony by a former DHS and ICE legal and budgeting official stating that it would be logistically difficult, if not impossible, for DHS to identify and segregate the relevant expenditures to ensure that only funds from the OBBBA were used to first promulgate and enforce the January 8 policy or will be used to enforce it going forward,” noted Cobb. And ICE provided “almost no details or specifics as to how DHS and ICE would accomplish this task in the face of the practical challenges.”

Which means: Nope! The January 8 Noem memo and the seven-day advance notice rule likely won’t cut it, either, and their enforcement is temporarily blocked as the case plays out.

Fast forward to Monday night, and an even bigger blow to the Trump administration’s immigration policy was delivered.

A judge temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians. Ending the program for Haitians, as the government was set to do this week, would mean that many people who came here legally—albeit with no path to citizenship—would suddenly be subject to deportation.

Even if you don’t have time to read all 83 pages of Judge Reyes’s opinion barring the Trump administration from rescinding Temporary Protected Status for 350,000+ Haitians, please at least check out the four-page introduction. It’s a tour de force:storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us…

— Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) 2026-02-03T01:06:19.093Z

The TPS designation “allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to live and work in the United States,” as Reason‘s Fiona Harrigan explained last year. It “offered legal status and work authorization to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) who passed security screenings and secured U.S.-based financial sponsors” and was used by hundreds of thousands of people.

In the ruling, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia paused the ending of TPS status for Haitians as a lawsuit challenging the policy plays out.

It is “substantially likely” that Noem was influenced to end Haitians’ TPS status based on “hostility to nonwhite immigrants,” opined Reyes, citing Noem’s assertion that we need a travel ban from Haiti and “every damn country that has been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“In addition to the migrants from Haiti, Noem has terminated protections for about 600,000 Venezuelans, 60,000 people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon,” notes NPR.

“This 11th hour reprieve is, of course, welcome,” said Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, of Reyes’ recent ruling. “But people can’t live their lives like this, pegging their families’ futures to a court case.”

The rulings come as congressional debates over ICE oversight and funding rage. These debates have been at the heart of a struggle to end a government shutdown, which may come to a close today.

????????????with Luna supporting the rule, it seems like shutdown will end tomorrow. https://t.co/kxEJFCl0HV

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) February 3, 2026

One of the main issues here has been that Democrats don’t want to pass a government funding bill that gives more money to the DHS, which oversees ICE. And as of yesterday, it wasn’t clear that Republicans in the House would have enough votes to pass the five-bill package passed by the Senate last week.

That package funds the DHS at existing levels for two weeks, giving lawmakers time to hash out a more long-term arrangement that is acceptable to both parties. It also funds many other federal departments through September 30.

President Donald Trump yesterday urged House Republicans to get it passed now as is:

Trump urging House Rs to quickly pass funding bill “without delay” AND without any changes: pic.twitter.com/SkHgrdZqLK

— Mica Soellner (@MicaSoellnerDC) February 2, 2026

Perhaps with an eye toward this effort, Noem yesterday announced a policy change that Democrats have been pushing for.

“Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” she said. “As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country.”

Scenes from Ohio: Hundreds of people gathered at a Springfield, Ohio, church yesterday to protest the ending of temporary protected status for Haitian migrants. Springfield has a large Haitian population and was rumored to be a major target of ICE enforcement efforts this week. (It was also the city that the Trump campaign in 2024 spread misinformation about immigrants eating dogs and cats.)

• Whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard:

WSJ: There is a whistleblower complaint against Tulsi Gabbard that is so sensitive that it is “said to be locked in a safe,” and the administration has spent months trying to figure out how inform Congress. pic.twitter.com/69p9qVwlag

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) February 2, 2026

• The DHS’ narrative around a Border Patrol officer shooting two Venezuelans in Oregon earlier this month is falling apart. According to the DHS, Border Patrol agents were in the midst of a “targeted” stop targeting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and the driver “weaponized their vehicle against” officers. “But court records obtained by the Guardian reveal a Department of Justice prosecutor later directly contradicted DHS’ Tren de Aragua statements in court,” the paper reports, and an FBI affidavit also contradicts DHS statements.

• Is panhandling protected speech? Alabama is asking the Supreme Court to end First Amendment protections for begging.

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom is pledging to review TikTok’s content moderation policies. It’s as unconstitutional as when Florida and Texas tried to control tech platform moderation policies, Mike Masnick writes. “For the Governor of California to jump from ‘some rando users reported upload problems during a technical outage’ to ‘we must investigate whether this violates California law’ is… not how any of this should work.” Of course, “even if every single one of these reports were accurate—even if TikTok were deliberately, systematically moderating content to favor Trump—that would be totally legal under the First Amendment.”

• In case you need a primer on Moltbook—essentially Reddit for robots—and the claims that AI agents are plotting against us there.

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