Judge Fred Biery lambasts Trump’s ‘ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented’ mass deportation campaign
A federal judge has ordered the release of a five-year-old boy and his father who were detained by federal immigration agents from their driveway in suburban Minneapolis and sent to a detention center in Texas.
In his ruling on Saturday, District Judge Fred Biery delivered a brutal assessment of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and an “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas” that appears to require “traumatizing children.”
Liam Conejo Ramos was taken into federal custody from the driveway of his family’s home last week after officers arrested his father Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, who is seeking asylum in the United States. They were sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas, where the preschooler is reportedly sick, lethargic and asking for his mother, according to his family and lawmakers who visited him this week.
The judge condemned the administration’s apparent “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and Thomas Jefferson’s warnings against “a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation.”
This is, uh, this is not how judges normally sign off on opinions:
Are you suggesting it’s inappropriate?
No. I am suggesting that these times are abnormal.
I have to wonder if they really are, or if Trumps regime is just so terrible at optics that we are seeing all the rot they been hiding behind the curtain for years.
He’s not smart enough to amass this much power this fast. He’s not rich enough. He’s not influential enough.
He stole something someone shouldn’t have had in the first place.
Normally, no. However it does humanize Liam Conejo Ramos as a child. The judge isn’t talking about some child that the public can’t visualize. We actually get to see what Liam Conejo Ramos looks like.
He’s trying to add every single bit of gravitas to his order
It’s amazing, tbh, one thing I didn’t expect from this entire situation is that the judiciary starts to really flex their literary and theatrical muscles in their authority, because while most legal business is rote ritual, they take advantage of that with this, and allow their legal opinions and the weight of their urgency to be seen
It gives me a little hope