"Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. He then described agents "masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind" seizing people for civil immigration violations and locking them up "without any semblance of due process.""
"The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order."
"The Government is wrong. Judges in this district have said that over and over and over."
Four federal judges in West Virginia's Southern District have issued forceful rulings challenging Operation Country Roads, a federal-local law enforcement partnership targeting immigrants on roadways. The initiative resulted in approximately 650 arrests in January, prompting habeas petitions from detainees, many without criminal records and with established U.S. ties. Judge Joseph Goodwin, a Clinton appointee, used unusually direct language in his February 19 opinion, describing agents operating from unmarked vehicles without warrants as conducting an "assault on the constitutional order." He criticized the systematic elimination of constitutional protections and due process safeguards. Goodwin's subsequent opinions expressed judicial exhaustion with repeated unconstitutional practices, indicating the court's patience with government violations had expired.
#immigration-enforcement #constitutional-rights #judicial-oversight #operation-country-roads #due-process
Read at Above the Law
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