Ixchop-Perez: ICE Arrested Him Outside the Hospital Where His Wife Was Giving Birth

ICE went to Mario Ixchop-Perez’s home and did not find him. His sister let the officers in after they said they were “police” looking for him. They stayed, asked her where he was and falsely told her he needed to sign probation paperwork. Then they arrested him, without a warrant, outside a San Francisco hospital where his wife was giving birth.

If something like that happened to you or to someone in your family, the first question is whether any of it counts in immigration court. Ixchop asked an immigration judge to throw out the evidence from his arrest and end his case. The judge refused without holding an evidentiary hearing and later denied his applications for asylum and withholding of removal. The Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed his appeal.

The Ninth Circuit gave him part of what he wanted in Ixchop-Perez v. Barr, No. 19-71144 (9th Cir. July 15, 2020). It rejected his complaints about the house. It sent the case back on three questions about the arrest: whether the missing warrant hurt him, what the officers knew about his immigration status, and whether ICE had to follow its own policy against arrests at hospitals.

A bad arrest does not end a removal case by itself

Immigration court is not criminal court. The rule that keeps unlawfully obtained evidence out of a criminal trial reaches a removal case only in two situations, the panel explained. One is a broken regulation: The agency violated “a regulation promulgated for the benefit of petitioners,” and the violation prejudiced the person’s protected interests. The other is an egregious Fourth Amendment violation, meaning evidence obtained by a deliberate violation or by conduct a reasonable officer should know is unconstitutional.

Those two doors explain the split result. Nearly every complaint Ixchop made had to fit through one of them.

What happened at the house was not egregious

Start with the approach. Officers entered the curtilage, the area immediately around the home, without a warrant and intending to arrest him. The panel found no egregious violation. At the time, no binding authority made an officer’s subjective intent relevant to entering the curtilage, and the entry was “consistent with an attempt to initiate consensual contact with the occupants of the home.”

Then the word “police.” Even assuming ICE officers are not police, the panel was not persuaded that the word alone misled his sister about why they wanted to come in. They said they were looking for him. Ixchop could not explain how that was inconsistent with a plan to arrest him if they found him. Because the consent held up, the officers also did not violate 8 C.F.R. section 287.8(f)(2), which generally bars entering a residence without a warrant or consent.

Then the false story. The consent covered looking for him. The officers remained after they did not find him and questioned his sister, using the claim about probation paperwork. Even assuming that went beyond what she had agreed to, it was not egregious. Ixchop identified no binding authority holding that this kind of questioning after a consent search violates the Fourth Amendment, and the Ninth Circuit’s cases on misrepresentations focused on the initial entry.

Two of those three rulings came down to the same words: no binding authority. Officers can cross a line and still escape the egregious label if the law was unclear when they did it. That makes the date of the encounter important.

No warrant, and no reason to think he would run

The arrest was different. A regulation required a warrant, and nothing showed its exception applied. Under section 287.8(c)(2)(ii), a warrant “shall be obtained except when the designated immigration officer has reason to believe that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.”

The immigration judge had relied on Ixchop’s immigration status. That was not enough. The regulation requires that the person be here without authorization and, separately, a determination of flight risk. And the facts ran the other way. Ixchop had lived in San Francisco for many years. His wife was giving birth in the hospital outside which he was arrested. Nothing in his criminal history pointed to flight. The officers knew his address before they set out. Nothing in the record suggested they had even considered whether he might flee or whether they needed a warrant.

The panel held that he had made a prima facie case, meaning enough to show the regulation was broken unless the government rebuts it.

A broken rule still required proof of harm

Showing the violation did not win the motion. The panel agreed that the warrant regulation protects people like Ixchop. It exists to set enforcement standards for how arrests are carried out. But the Fourth Amendment does not require a determination of exigency before a warrantless arrest in public. Because the Constitution did not demand what the regulation demanded, the court could not presume that breaking the regulation had prejudiced him.

Someone had to decide whether it did. Neither the immigration judge nor the Board had addressed prejudice, so the panel sent that question back to the agency to answer first.

Nobody could say what the officers knew

The regulation has a second condition. Before arresting someone without a warrant, officers need reason to believe the person is unlawfully present, a standard the panel described as equivalent to probable cause.

The immigration judge had decided the motion without an evidentiary hearing. On the record that left, the panel could not tell what information the officers had about his immigration status before they arrested him. It remanded for “a more fulsome development of the record.”

The missing-warnings claim failed

Ixchop also argued that officers did not tell him why he was being arrested, that he had a right to a lawyer, or what his statements could mean. Even assuming a violation of 8 C.F.R. section 287.3(c), the panel said those advisals are not constitutionally required at the time of arrest, so prejudice could not be presumed.

That is the same rule the warrant claim faced, with a different ending. On the warrant, no one had decided prejudice, so the question went back. On the warnings, the Board had decided that he failed to show prejudice, and the panel found no error.

The hospital-policy question went back

An ICE directive prohibited arrests at sensitive locations, such as hospitals, absent exigent circumstances. The panel did not identify it by name. The directive also said it did not provide any rights or benefits. That disclaimer did not end the matter. Under the Accardi doctrine, an agency may have to follow its own internal policies, and the doctrine can reach practices an agency says are not binding.

The immigration judge and the Board had not addressed whether Accardi governed this directive. The panel remanded for “further factual development regarding the nature and extent of agency statements regarding” arrests at sensitive locations, and for a decision on whether a policy bound the agency.

The policy landscape has changed since then. A federal court in Maryland traced it in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 8:25-cv-00243-TDC, ECF 60 (D. Md. Feb. 24, 2025), a case about places of worship. As that court described it, a 2011 ICE memorandum restricted enforcement at sensitive locations until October 2021, when a Homeland Security memorandum replaced it with guidance on “protected areas,” including medical facilities. On January 20, 2025, the Department rescinded that guidance. A January 31, 2025 ICE memorandum made supervisors responsible for case-by-case decisions about enforcement in or near protected areas, which it defined to include hospitals.

The plaintiffs there won a preliminary injunction requiring the Department to follow its earlier guidance at their own houses of worship, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed it in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 25-1512 (4th Cir. Aug. 18, 2026). That injunction does not reach hospitals. Judge Agee wrote separately to say that locations that are not places of worship “would need to proceed on their own merits in bringing any challenge.”

Anyone making an argument like Ixchop’s has to start with the policy in force on the day of the arrest and what the agency said about it.

What went back, and what stayed decided

The panel granted the petition in part and denied it in part. Three questions returned to the agency: whether the warrantless arrest prejudiced Ixchop, what the officers knew about his status, and whether the hospital directive bound ICE.

His challenges to the entry, the consent and the questioning at the house were rejected, and so was the warnings claim. Ixchop had not challenged the denial of cancellation of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture. Because the case was going back, the panel did not address the denial of his application for relief, which its final footnote calls “withholding and removal.”

The panel did not suppress anything or end the removal case. It told the agency what it still had to answer. The memorandum does not say what the agency did next.

What to gather after an arrest like this

• The date and the place. The state of the law and the ICE policy in force on that day can both decide the argument. Write down exactly where the arrest happened, including whether it was at or near a hospital.
• Any warrant. Find out whether one existed. If none did, the question becomes why officers believed the person would escape before they could get one.
• The facts against flight. How long the person has lived at the address, whether officers already knew it, and why the person was where the arrest happened. Those facts mattered in Ixchop-Perez.
• What officers knew beforehand. A record that does not show it was enough to send this case back. Ask for the government’s arrest paperwork.
• The exact words at the door. Who spoke, what agency they named, what reason they gave and who heard it. A relative who answered the door may be the most important witness.
• What the violation cost. Identify each piece of government evidence that came from the arrest. A prima facie violation still needs an answer on prejudice unless the Constitution itself required what the officers skipped.
• The arguments made so far. Raise each ground before the immigration judge and again on appeal to the Board. Ixchop’s challenge to one denial stayed alive only because the Board addressed the suppression issues anyway.

Suppression is one route, and it belongs to the removal case. A challenge to present detention is a separate one, as our analysis of Jorge A.-G. and Orlando A.-R. explains. Our guide to what ICE officers must say and show at an arrest in California covers the identification rules. For representation, see our deportation defense practice.