West Virginia US District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin has criticized ICE tactics before. But, now he has found their tactics to violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. ICE arrested an immigrant from El Salvador while they were wearing masks, driving unmarked vehicles, and without a warrant of any sort. The immigrant, Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, came to the US as a child. He has a pending asylum request and a work permit. That means he is here legally. Yet, ICE arrested him and imprisoned him with no due process of any kind, said the Judge. Judge Goodwin wrote:

“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 what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.”

Mr. Urquilla-Ramos was arrested after a traffic stop. The agents were driving an unmarked wehilce with no license plates. They stooped Urquilla-Ramos supposedly because he had a plastic cover on his own license plate. As the Judge said, these are exactly the sorts of things the Founders rebelled against. See ABA Bar Journal report here for more information.