Another Activist Judge Interferes With Immigration Law Enforcement

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On January 31^st, an activist Clinton-appointed federal District Court Judge, Fred Biery, granted the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for habeas corpus protection and ordered that they be released from detention. The ruling is an insult to the judiciary. When Judge Biery was not childishly insulting the Trump administration and ludicrously accusing it of “perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty,” he offered platitudes and dogmatic assertions instead of factual and legal analysis.

An attorney for Adrian Conejo Arias and his son claimed that they had entered the United States in 2024 using the Biden administration’s CBP One app, which the Trump administration shut down upon taking office. However, according to Fox News, “DHS has no record of him or his family entering the U.S. via the Biden-era CBP One cell phone app.”

Immigration authorities classified Adrian Arias as a “noncitizen in irregular immigration status.” He would have been permitted to leave the U.S. voluntarily “with no immigration consequences, but he declined,” Fox News reported.

Adrian Arias and his son were picked up, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said, in the Minneapolis area after ICE agents approached the vehicle in which they had travelled and the father fled on foot, leaving his son behind. DHS noted that an ICE agent remained with the child, whose mother refused to admit her son into their home. ICE Executive Assistant Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Marcos Charles explained that “My officers stayed with the child… when we approached the door of his residence, the people inside refused to take him in and open the door.”

Other officers caught up with the fleeing Adrian Arias and apprehended him. Mr. Arias and his son were then sent to a detention center in Texas, from which Judge Biery ordered their release. They have returned to Minnesota, while the Trump administration is appealing Judge Biery’s order and seeking their expedited deportation.

After straying far afield with quoted excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, Judge Biery got around to citing what he called “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment.” This amendment to the Constitution upholds the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and states that a warrant can only be issued “upon probable cause.”

“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster,” Judge Biery wrote in his snarky 3-page opinion. “That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer. Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R.”

Civics lesson to Judge Biery: Facts matter. You neglected to mention, much less analyze, the totality of the factual circumstances in this case, which justify DHS’s enforcement of its administrative warrant. ICE agents did not enter the Arias home without consent, even after Adrian Arias fled and left his son all alone under dangerous conditions. In such perilous circumstances, ICE had the right to chase down the fleeing father and detain him, without requiring a judicial warrant. An administrative warrant was sufficient.

Finally, to underscore Judge Biery’s sloppiness, he ignored language in a Supreme Court decision written by the distinguished Justice Felix Frankfurter, which acknowledged the “impressive historical evidence of acceptance of the validity of statutes providing for administrative deportation arrest from almost the beginning of the Nation.” (Abel v. United States, 362 U.S. 217 (1960))

Judge Biery’s fundamentally flawed ruling, if it survives, ties immigration law enforcement agents’ hands beyond what the Fourth Amendment requires when DHS is not going inside someone’s home without that person’s consent to enforce an administrative warrant.

Judge Biery closed his order, which was erroneously dated February 31, 2026, as follows: “With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” What this activist judge really did was to poke his finger directly in the eye of the U.S. judiciary, which is expected to conduct itself with reason and impartiality.