Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas issued an order releasing five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Conejo Arias from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. Liam became a symbol of the human cost of the Trump administration’s occupying surge in Minnesota when a camera caught him standing in the cold with a blue bunny hat and backpack while government agents arrested the child. Judge Biery’s short, poignant order delivers a comprehensive civics lesson laced with contempt for what the judge calls “the perfidious lust for unbridled power.”
Trump supporters quickly launched into mocking the judge.
This is extra funny when you remember Mizelle’s wife is a federal judge with a not qualified rating from the ABA.
That said, the order is “SIGNED this 31st day of February, 2026.” Which is, of course, not a date. But it’s also a pretty easy error to understand. The judge probably expected to drop the order on February 1 (or the 2nd), perhaps after padding the sparse document with some additional facts and analysis, but ultimately decided there’s no time like the present to free a five-year-old from an internment camp. He slapped a “31” into the date slot and forgot to change the month.
It doesn’t change the substance of the ruling, but it does give the administration’s boosters — for whom “substantive legal reasoning” might be the only foreign concept they hate more than immigrants — a sad artifact to hang their criticism upon.
Judge Biery may have fired off a bare bones opinion, but it only takes a handful of sentences to lay out the legal issue:
Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.
This is, of course, exactly right. ICE has been conducting enforcement actions based on administrative warrants — essentially permission slips the executive branch writes for itself — rather than judicial warrants supported by probable cause. The Fourth Amendment requires the latter. This has always been the case, and the administration keeps lying about it.
Judge Biery notes that Liam may ultimately end up being thrown out of the country, but it not without due process.
Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.
And that’s the most important takeaway. As conservatives sneer at this opinion, they aren’t angry about this family’s immigration status, they’re angry at the premise that the administration has to follow rules at all.
Is the opinion a little self-indulgent? Sure. Quoting the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and Ben Franklin’s “a republic, if you can keep it” might be over the top, but no one benefits from normalizing the abnormal. When the government takes the position that it writes its own warrants, there aren’t a lot of relevant analogs beyond the founding.
But it’s hard to convey how utterly bleak this is. A 78-year-old judge, the oldest active judge in his district, casts himself as the “judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” It’s both an acknowledgement that the federal district courts remain the tenuous check against authoritarianism and an implicit prediction that the waves will crash through once the Fifth Circuit gets involved. Most of all, it’s a level of dire coming from a veteran jurist that sums up the nihilistic abyss of 2026 America.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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