“Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government — masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind — are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them 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. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.”
You’re probably asking yourself, “What crazy Antifa whacko wrote that communist bilge?” Well, it was a U.S. district judge from the liberal haven of West Virginia named Joseph E. Goodwin. The case that inspired his opinion involved the apprehension of one Anderson Urquilla-Ramos, a 21-year-old man from El Salvador. He was pulled over, ostensibly because there was a plastic cover on the license plate of his vehicle. Ironically, the stop was made by masked agents in a black SUV that had no license plate.
Urquilla-Ramos had entered the country four years earlier as an unaccompanied minor and was then placed under the care of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, through the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement. He had a pending asylum application, a lawful work authorization, and a valid driver’s license. He was in this country legally. Nevertheless, he was taken to South Central Regional Jail in Charleston and detained, pending transfer to a detention facility or deportation, and was never cited or charged for a traffic violation.
Goodwin cut through the government attorneys’ arguments, such as they were, like so much soft, smelly cheese. “The overarching issue,” he wrote, “is whether the federal government may deploy anonymous agents to seize persons on American streets and highways for civil violations, without warrants, without identification, and without any due process before or after.”
Goodwin said Urquillo-Ramos’ stop, arrest, and detention violated multiple constitutional and regulatory protections. He continued: “Petitioner was arrested by unidentifiable, masked officers acting without a warrant, without articulable justification for concealing their identities, and with no mechanism by which he could identify those seizing him or meaningfully test the legality of their asserted authority.”
That issue — the legality of unidentifiable law-enforcement agents behaving without due process or constitutional constraints — is the foundation of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” efforts. And Goodwin destroyed it: “Authoritarian regimes have used masked security forces to intimidate and control populations. In this nation’s history, the Ku Klux Klan relied on masks to terrorize victims while concealing accountability. … The ICE tactics of anonymous enforcement in this case contravene the history, purpose, and modern interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.”
Who knows whether a superior court will uphold Goodwin’s ruling. We can only hope so. Meanwhile, in cities and towns all across this country, including in Memphis, procedures such as those used to imprison Urquillo-Ramos are used innumerable times each day. I say “innumerable” because we have no real way of knowing the scope of the operations, or any way to account for the whereabouts of so many of those sent off to the shiny new American Gulags. Or to countries unknown.
Secrecy surrounds so many of this administration’s actions — ICE deployments, the bombing of “drug boats,” the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the DOGE job cuts and concurrent lifting of millions of Americans’ personal and financial data onto unknown servers, the sudden demolition of the East Wing, the side-deals cut by Trump’s own family, and the curated and clumsy redactions in the released Epstein files. I could go on, but I don’t have space.
The administration has also eliminated most Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) staff, thereby ensuring that pesky journalists won’t be able to see what should be accessible public documents.
I know — it’s all so overwhelming. This pack of amoral reprobates is “flooding the zone” with so many outrageous actions (and distractions) it’s hard to keep up. But we must keep up and speak out — and pray that secrets can’t be kept forever.