“Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, a Clinton appointee, wrote in a Feb. 19 opinion. “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,” he continued.