Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday, the Trump administration got some good(?) news from Judge Eric Tostrud, whom Donald Trump appointed to the bench back in 2018. We write "good(?)" because this theoretically shouldn't be good news at all. It should, in fact, be completely irrelevant. But with this administration...
Anyhow, in an emergency order issued last week, Tostrud forbade the federal government from destroying any evidence related to the killing of Alex Pretti. Yesterday, in an 18-page ruling, Tostrud lifted the order. His reasoning is that there are already laws in place that protect evidence from being destroyed, and that his personal, ongoing supervision of the matter would be excessive and redundant.
Tostrud also observed that the situation has changed since he made his initial ruling, and that now the FBI has taken over the investigation, assuaging concerns about the mishandling of evidence. The Judge concedes, in his ruling, that he doesn't actually have direct confirmation of this (seemingly critical) fact, and that he's relying on "media reports." This being the case, it seems a little odd that he's not familiar with the voluminous "media reports" about the kind of person FBI Director Kash Patel is, and the ways in which Patel has abused his office for political purposes.
Again, this really should not be good news. It should be non-news. The only way it is good news for the administration is if it was planning to destroy or otherwise mishandle evidence. We suppose we aren't as kind-hearted and optimistic as Tostrud is, because that is exactly what we expect the administration to do, whether it's the FBI, or ICE, or some other entity that does it. The good news for anyone who cares about things like truth and justice is that the most damning evidence of all, namely the videos, is already out there for the world to see, and it isn't going away, no matter what Patel does.
That's about the only judicial good news for the White House on the Minnesota front, though. Otherwise, it's been pretty disastrous for the last week or so. We'll start with the utter fiasco that is the detention of 5-year-old Liam Ramos. Ramos' parents, for those who have not followed the story, are immigrants from Ecuador who arrived in the U.S. in 2024. They say they applied for asylum, and have followed the process as instructed. The Trump administration says the Ramoses are in the country illegally. Given that the Trump administration pooh-poohs the validity of asylum, it is possible that both sides are saying the exact same thing. In any event, there is evidence to back up the asylum claim.
The Ramos family lives in Columbia Heights, a suburb north of Minneapolis that has been a particular target of ICE. A little over a week ago, the agency showed up to detain, at very least, Liam's father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. When the agents arrived, Liam happened to be in the driveway, and so he was detained, too. Why was he detained? That depends on who you ask. ICE officers claim they tried to hand Ramos off to his mother, but she refused to take him, and so they took young Liam for humanitarian purposes. The Ramos family claims that ICE was using Liam as bait to try to get his mother out of the house, so that she could be detained, as well. Since she is pregnant, and has other children to watch out for, she refused to come outside. In response to this, DHS officials declared they would never, ever use a child as bait.
Who is telling the truth here? Well, there's at least one piece of evidence that hints at an answer. Liam Ramos is not the first child from his school to be detained. Or the second. Or even the third. Nope, this is the fourth time that a child from the same school has been snatched up by ICE officers in the last couple of weeks. Either there are a lot of unusually indifferent mothers the suburbs of Minneapolis, or something stinks in the state of Minnesota. More specifically, it is either the case that ICE is trying to use kids as bait, or else that the Trump administration regards kids as being no different from their parents, and equally undesirable, and so valid targets of enforcement actions. Of course, it could be both of these things.
If someone is going to be the face of your administration's fight against undocumented immigration, you would undoubtedly prefer someone who looks something like this:
We are not paid political consultants, but we think that this is probably a tad less effective, messaging-wise:
If we WERE political consultants, and we were working for this administration, we would advise that Liam Ramos be released and returned to his mother, even if the father remains in detention. But that's not how this administration works; when Team Trump screws up, it just doubles down. So, the two Ramoses were not only kept in lock-up, they were transferred to a famously brutal facility in Texas, more than 1,000 miles away. This is a common practice these days—to spirit those whom ICE detains away to far-flung detention centers before they can exercise any of their rights or even before their status is known. Thereafter it was for the courts to decide.
And now, they have decided. Late Friday, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who sits in the San Antonio Division of the Western District of Texas, ordered that Ramos and his father be released. In his brief and scathing order, the judge included the now-iconic photo of Liam and accused the agents and DHS of deliberately ignoring a quaint little document called the Declaration of Independence and the "pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment." The order is short and worth a read in its entirety, but here is a salient quote: "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."
Biery also doesn't mince words in describing how we got here: "The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children." And the Judge offers this withering takedown of those in power who are pushing and celebrating these tactics: "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned." That goes quite a bit farther than he needed to with this order and is a sobering pronouncement. Biery doesn't name names, but he doesn't really have to. In his conclusion, after quoting Ben Franklin ("a republic, if you can keep it") the Judge signs the order with this closing: "With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike." Underneath his signature is Liam's photo and two Bible verses, Matthew 19:14 ("let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these") and John 11:35 ("Jesus wept.").
On Sunday, DHS followed the court's order and released both Liam and his father and they returned home to Columbia Heights. They were accompanied home by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) who said that he is also trying to secure the release of all families from the Dilley detention center, where they were held, where unsafe and unsanitary conditions have led to protests outside and inside the facility.
Pointed orders like the one from Biery are becoming a nearly everyday phenomenon. More and more district judges are sounding the alarm and trying to hold on to what remains of the rule of law in this country. Last week, after repeated violations of his order to release Juan Robles, U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz (District Court in Minnesota) threatened to hold Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in contempt unless Robles was released. For his order, in which he said "ICE is not a law unto itself," Schiltz took the unprecedented step of appending a list of 96 court orders that ICE has violated just in the Twin Cities alone and just in the month of January as part of "Operation Metro Surge." He added: "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence."
Shortly after Schiltz' order, his colleague, Judge John R. Tunheim, blocked ICE from targeting thousands of refugees residing lawfully in Minnesota, and ordered any that had been detained to be released and returned to Minnesota. Under "Operation PARRIS," ICE has been sweeping up refugees already in the system but awaiting permanent resident status. You know, people like the Ramoses. Judge Tunheim noted, "These refugees have undergone rigorous background checks and vetting, been approved by multiple federal agencies for entry, been given permission to work, received support from the government, and been resettled in the United States. Because of conditions in their home countries, they have been deemed of special humanitarian concern to the United States. None have been deemed a danger to the community or a flight risk. None have been charged with any ground for removal."
In other words, these people followed all the rules and have done nothing wrong, but Trump, Stephen Miller and company want them in prison anyway. The judge described one man who was lured outside by someone claiming to have hit his car. When he went outside to look, he was surrounded by heavily armed agents and shoved into the back of a van. He was flown to Texas and kept in shackles and handcuffs and interrogated for 16 hours. In a separate order regarding a legal refugee from Myanmar, a nursing mother who was flown out of Minnesota before she could challenge her detention, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis ruled that "There is simply no legal reason for keeping this mother 1800 miles away from her family," adding later in his ruling: "There is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state."
This sort of cruelty is being visited upon many, if not most, of the people being indiscriminately taken. And remember, there are no removal orders to deport such people, so they are just sitting in warehouses in deplorable and inhumane conditions where there have been documented human rights abuses. The private prison companies that run these places, like CoreCivic, are raking it in, but even they don't have the staff or ability to build out the needed capacity this quickly.
Meanwhile, there is less and less of an opportunity for any kind of due process so they might get out of the hellholes in which they are being dumped. When immigrants are detained, they have the right to a bond hearing so they can be released pending the adjudication of their cases. But the administration no longer allows those hearings in immigration court, so each detainee has to file for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court, which requires finding a lawyer. Most do not have the resources so they languish in whatever camp they are sent to. Last Wednesday a class action was filed on behalf of the thousands who are being held in a makeshift detention camp at the Whipple federal building in Minneapolis. And on Monday, Judge Jia Cobb ordered DHS to allow Congressional representatives unfettered access to detention centers without notice, blocking a new policy requiring a week's notice before a visit.
For those that do file a habeas petition, there is now a huge backlog of such petitions in the courts. This has not gotten much attention, but it's putting an enormous strain on the court system. Since ICE descended on Minnesota, the District of Minnesota's seven full-time judges, along with some semi-retired judges, have been pressed into service to address the surge in cases. There have been 280 habeas petitions filed in one month, where in the average month there are usually around ten.
Understand that federal judges operate with restraint and precision in their language. They are not given to hyperbole and generally abhor its display by the advocates appearing before them. So, when these same judges, regardless of who appointed them (and each of the last five presidents is represented in this item), offer unsolicited screeds about ever-increasing volumes, and ever more egregious abuses of law, we would do well to heed their warnings. They do not cry wolf and are not Chicken Little. There is simply no reason for all these resources to be taken from actual crime-fighting and diverted to snatching up law-abiding, hard-working people, many of whom are U.S. citizens, just because they are not white.
Of course, for many in the White House, with Miller in particular leaping to mind, all of this is a feature, not a bug. The administration wants people to "self-deport," and the more misery they can visit on brown people, the more likely those brown people will decide that remaining in the U.S. just isn't worth it. Further, Miller and some of the others hate these people on a visceral level. Because these folks were born brown and not American, they are seen as the enemy. And what do you want your enemy to do, while you are trying to defeat them? You want them to suffer.
The judges are having none of it, though, and one can only imagine the folks in the robes are going to get less and less patient and more and more assertive. In particular, if the day comes that a judge holds someone like Miller or DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or Border czar Tom Homan in criminal contempt, and orders them jailed, the dam could break, and other judges might well begin following suit en masse, once the Rubicon has been crossed.
Meanwhile, and this is the overall theme of this series, this kind of lawless behavior, particularly when targeted at sympathetic figures like Liam Ramos, is politically disastrous. Look, in particular, at the election in Tarrant County in Texas this weekend. Take note of the fact that Tarrant County is 30% Latino. And think about what that means for November's elections. (L & Z)