Judges In A Trump Stronghold Condemn Ice Tactics

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.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Justice Department said it “is focused on law and order, public safety, and will not tolerate any violence directed toward law enforcement officials working tirelessly to keep Americans safe, despite the best efforts of activist judges who’d rather see violent illegal criminals walk free.” The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Goodwin’s ruling was only the latest to frame the Trump administration’s immigration tactics in such stark terms. U.S. District Judge Robert Chambers, another Clinton appointee, said the American dream has been “tarnished” by the administration’s illegal detentions. U.S. District Judge Irene Berger accused the administration of a “lack of respect for the law” after noting that arrests and detentions were continuing at a rapid clip despite the four judges’ conclusions that they were illegal.

Berger, an Obama appointee, and Thomas Johnston, a George W. Bush appointee, have separately concluded that ordering the Trump administration to provide bond hearings for ICE detainees — as opposed to outright release — would be futile. The executive branch-run system has removed “immigration judges who provide neutral adjudications” and “bond is systematically denied after a pro forma hearing with a predetermined outcome,” Berger wrote in a Feb. 24 ruling.

In a recent case, Berger said the administration pushed back on this claim, noting that immigration judges had ordered release in about 25 percent of cases in the most recent fiscal year. But Berger said this data did not include January and February 2026, the timeframe within which all of West Virginia’s cases had emerged.

Berger’s grievances have not ended there. She lambasted the administration for “sloppiness” in a case in which she said officials accused an ICE detainee of having convictions for marijuana possession in 2009.

“The Petitioner was four years old in 2009,” Berger wrote, suggesting that it raised deeper concerns about the reliability of procedures ICE was using to deny people their liberty.

Like Goodwin, Johnston has similarly warned of what mass detention without due process could mean for U.S. citizens — not just their noncitizen counterparts.

“If the government may simply seize someone without due process, there is no check on its ability to seize anyone,” he wrote on Feb. 4. “One might say, ‘I don’t care because that only happens to THOSE people.’ Perhaps. But what if someone here legally, or even a United States citizen, is afforded no due process after being seized by mistake? Or by a choice?”

“Fortunately,” he concluded, “our Constitution demands more, including the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of unchecked executive fiat.”

And like judges in other federal districts, the jurists in West Virginia make clear that they don’t lay the blame for legal violations at the feet of the line attorneys who appear in their courtrooms.

“The problem lies in the attorneys’ clients, federal government actors, who have offered no evidence that they have seen or even care about the legal rulings of this district,” Goodwin wrote. “The disregard for the law shames every hard working public servant who toils for the benefit of the country and its people.”