Politico reports:

Federal judges in one of the Trumpiest states in the country have suddenly become a firewall against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

District court judges in West Virginia describe rampant lawlessness by masked ICE agents, defiance of court orders and a wanton infliction of fear and intimidation by the federal government after the Trump administration deployed a targeted immigration enforcement operation in the state last month.

“Operation Country Roads,” a partnership with federal and local law enforcement that netted an estimated 650 arrests in January, primarily focused on targeting immigrants driving along the state’s roadways. It has resulted in a flood of lawsuits by people — most without criminal records and with longstanding ties to the U.S. — seeking release from ICE custody.

Though federal judges in other states have raised alarms, four judges in deep-red West Virginia who have been inundated by Country Roads cases are using their rulings to grab Americans by the shoulders and warn against a descent into authoritarianism — often in terms they acknowledge are un-judicial.

“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.

There are five federal judges in active service on the federal bench in the Southern District of West Virginia, where the immigration cases have all been concentrated. The district’s chief judge, Trump appointee Frank Volk, has yet to weigh in on the mass detention policy. But the other four have been on a tear in recent weeks. And they’re now promising “legal consequences” if the administration and its allies in state government keep detaining people in ways they have deemed unconstitutional. Those consequences could range from civil fines to contempt.

“The Government is wrong. Judges in this district have said that over and over and over,” Goodwin wrote in an opinion on Friday that he labeled a “final notice” to federal officials enforcing immigration law. “If officials could repeat practices already determined to be unconstitutional and require each affected person to begin anew … judicial power would be reduced to commentary. The Constitution does not contemplate violations in installments.” [Continue reading…]