Friday’s arrest follows the ICE’s controversial arrests Wednesday of migrants who had reportedly shown up at San Antonio Immigration Court for scheduled court dates. Credit: Michael Karlis

The Trump administration’s surging arrests of migrants at immigration courts will drive undocumented people from taking legal pathways to citizenship and deter them from cooperating with police and other authorities, San Antonio lawmakers caution.

The warning comes as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made recent headlines by arresting migrants as they leave immigration hearings, including at downtown’s San Antonio Immigration Court. Since last week, federal agents have arrested multiple people outside the Alamo City court, and some of the busts have been accompanied by heart-wrenching videos of families being separated.

“It’s discouraging other people from following the law and showing up for their court hearings,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio. “And for years, we were concerned about undocumented folks living in the shadows, and we didn’t know what they were doing and whether they were paying taxes — all of those things. What’s going on with ICE right now is encouraging that kind of behavior, because these people [who have been picked up] were clearly following the law.”

In some cases, ICE agents are swooping in to detain people after immigration judges dismiss their deportation case, something Castro called an “ugly kind of bait-and-switch.”

State Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, said word of the court arrests will get around to migrant communities. He expects they’ll soon avoid hearings and jump off the legal pathway to citizenship conservatives have long argued they must take if they want to live in the country.

“If you’re going to be setting people up, then people are going to figure out,” Menéndez said. “These are people who are trying to play by the rules, and you have these masked ICE agents arresting them indiscriminately.”

Gregory Zhen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told ABC News that his organization has tracked ICE arrests at courthouses in at least 13 states and 19 cities over the past two weeks.
Thursday, in San Antonio’s most recent court bust, ICE agents carried off at least seven people, including a mother and her 3-year-old child, according to local activists.

The controversial enforcement actions come as the Trump White House pushes immigration agencies to meet the president’s campaign promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. ICE arrests during Trump’s second term blew past 100,000 this week, according to internal government records cited by CBS News.

Menéndez said the White House’s strategy of targeting immigration courts is “dystopian” and is likely to increase immigrants’ distrust of police, judges and other legal authorities.

“It’s going to create a disincentive to play by the rules,” he said. “I don’t know where we end up with this. I’m concerned, very, very concerned people are just going to start taking the law into their own hands and avoid law enforcement altogether.”

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