‘Resistance’-rotted judge’s anti-ICE emoting only undermines his own case

In the annals of left-wing jurisprudence, the ruling issued Saturday by Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas sets a whole new standard for judicial activism.

The opinion, which secured the immediate release of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his 5-year-old son Liam, offers a glimpse inside the “resistance”-rotted brain of an activist judge.

Liam, you’ll recall, became a social-media sensation last month when activists accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers of “using him as bait” to arrest his dad in Minneapolis.

ICE denied the tale, countering that Conejo Arias had abandoned the tot in the frigid street when he saw agents coming.

Unfortunately, Saturday’s ruling by the 78-year-old Clinton appointee, which is heavy on moral posturing and light on law, is just the latest in a wider trend of judges abusing the court as their personal soapbox, a trend that has reached even the Supreme Court.

Letting loose with such unchecked emotion is unbecoming for any judge, regardless of the issue.

However, in Biery’s case specifically, grandstanding from the bench is worse than inappropriate; it’s reckless.

Biery has inserted himself into a contentious constitutional debate over whether administrative warrants issued by the Department of Homeland Security legally permit federal officers to forcibly enter homes to arrest immigrants with final removal orders — or whether the executive branch is violating the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment with such tactics.

You’d think that, given the stakes, Biery would have made his opinion legally airtight.

You’d think he would have been careful not to muddy things with unnecessary sentimentalism or openly hostile and partisan language that practically begs for a legal challenge.

You’d be wrong.

Biery’s three-page ruling is 99% a teary-eyed appeal to emotion, with the remaining 1% consisting of offhand mentions of case law, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and Thomas Jefferson.

The closest he comes to explaining his reasoning is when he casually asserts that the Fourth Amendment requires the oversight of an independent judicial official.

“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster,” he declares.

“That is called the fox guarding the henhouse.”

What is this?

Amid the debate over the constitutionality of DHS’s actions, the best Biery can offer is a diary entry filled with idioms about foxes and pleas for a more “humane” immigration policy rooted in “human decency”?

As if that weren’t ridiculous enough, he signs off with a line of self-praise, lauding himself for having stuck his “judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”

To heighten the drama, he also added to his signature the now-viral photo of little Liam, standing in the snow in his sweet blue cap and Spider-Man backpack, along with two Bible citations (Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35).

Finally, as a sort of unintentional coup de grâce for this embarrassing exercise in Boomerific left-wing foolishness, Biery completes his order with a nonexistent date: “SIGNED this 31st day of February, 2026.”

He can’t even lean on leap year as a defense.

To call this a judicial opinion would be misleading. It’s barely even an opinion.

It’s a smorgasbord of over-the-top emotion, loosely stuck together with saccharine platitudes.

We’re no strangers to flimsy rulings, especially given recent judicial resistance to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

After all, we live in an era where liberal Supreme Court justices often append overwrought signoffs to their decisions, including when Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer wrote in their Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization dissent: “With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent.”

Sotomayor also concluded her opinion in Trump vs. the United States with the line: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

But this disaster from Judge Biery is so uniquely idiotic and childish that it’s almost impossible to believe it’s real.

Worse than being merely self-absorbed, Biery’s opinion makes a mess of a difficult legal debate, almost ensuring his ruling will face robust challenges — and keeping the Arias family in the administration’s deportation crosshairs.

This raises the obvious question: What was the point of this?

Was the judge aiming for sound jurisprudence, or merely a self-indulgent display of performative resistance?

If the former, Biery failed miserably.

If the latter, well, perhaps Biery’s talents would be better suited to a life in community theater, where his emoting and histrionics would be put to better use.

T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, DC.