In a week that will live on as one of the most memorable of this year, federal District Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas delivered an opinion that reads less like a court ruling and more like the collected works of a civics teacher who spent too many summers reading Blackstone’s Commentaries by campfire. The case was thrust into the national consciousness by a photograph of a five-year-old boy, who came to be nicknamed “Little Liam,” wearing a bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack surrounded by immigration agents.
Liam (referred to in the opinion only by his initials), was a preschooler scooped up along with his father by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as the two returned home in Minnesota and, as ICE loves to do, quickly shipped off to Texas. The circumstances, as quoted at length by Judge Biery, sound like something out of a Kafka novel: agents allegedly used Liam as “bait” to round up the rest of the family (a claim ICE denies).
When Liam’s father then filed a habeas corpus petition asking to be released from detention, Judge Biery took what might have been a standard ruling and turned it into a polemic fit for the Fourth of July, with various legal, historical, and even Biblical asides for good measure.
A typical court order might have sufficed — “The petition is granted” — but not from Judge Biery. Instead, it unfurled like a long-lost chapter of The Federalist Papers, as he also cited the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”) along with references to Magna Carta, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, and lengthy quotations from Declaration of Independence. While the Declaration itself has no legal force, much of what is today in the Bill of Rights is a direct response to many “hated British practices,” cited in the Declaration as offenses by King George against the colonists, such as their use of blank warrants signed by the same officers who executed them. Or, as Biery put it, “That is called the fox guarding the henhouse.”
From there, the opinion got positively transcendental. Biery lamented the government’s “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented pursuit of daily deportation quotas — apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” He then ordered Liam and his father released . . . but added three curious addenda.
First, otherwise out of context and with no preamble, he quoted a famous exchange between Benjamin Franklin and a woman who stopped him as he came out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. She asked: “”Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?” referring to what kind of government. He answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” And then Judge Biery concluded his text, “With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”
Following his signature, however, were two even rarer additions to a court opinion. He cited, with no explanation, two Biblical verses. And he closed the opinion with a photograph of Liam in his bunny hat.
The two biblical citations: Matt. 19:14: (“Suffer little children . . . to come unto me”) and the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” The word “suffer” in the first passage is a somewhat archaic term today, meaning “allow” or “tolerate.” (The Apostles didn’t want Jesus bothered by a bunch of unwashed kids, but Jesus chided them to let the children come to him.) But there’s a dual meaning in that passage, of course, because the modern meaning of “suffer,” is to experience pain or discomfort . . . which Liam and his father certainly did.
It is rare to find this combination of multiple citations to constitutional text, English and American legal history, and the Judeo-Christian canon. Yet Judge Biery used these sources not only to make his ruling, but also to scold, repeatedly and scathingly, the ICE agents and their superiors for unnecessarily heavy-handed tactics — or, as Biery called it, their “perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty.”
In a legal culture where opinions can be as bland as unbuttered toast, this one was more like a well-seasoned main course: robust, memorable, and even a little smoky. Whether future courts will embrace Biery’s approach or treat it as an outlier remains to be seen. But for now, the image of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible hanging out together under one judge’s signature — with a picture of a five-year-old thrown in for good measure — will be remembered as one of 2026’s most curious judicial tableaux.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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