From The Federalist
Federal judges are only allowed to wear one hat: the judge hat. But all too often, judges are found wearing the president’s hat, or one belonging to a congressman.
On Jan. 31, 2026, Judge Fred Biery, of the Western District of Texas, demonstrated this trend with modern federal judges. He issued an opinion lobbing broad accusations of “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas,” but did so without any reference or citation to the record of the case in front of him. He went on to quote Thomas Jefferson, the Fourth Amendment, and the Bible, but provided no application as to how they are relevant to the matter at hand, again because he cited no details whatsoever about the case in front of him. He stated broadly that “administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster,” without citing a single case or authority to support that proposition.
This example is about as egregious an example of judicial overreach as one will find. It is an effort to subvert federal immigration policy, which is a function explicitly given under the Constitution to Congress, which delegated the application to the executive branch’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Judge Biery, instead of citing the portions of the Constitution that address immigration or federal laws that detail immigration protocols, simply declared that deportations cannot occur under the processes created by DHS, thereby taking away powers vested in both Congress and DHS.