The Strategic Vulnerability of Poetic Justice: Using Children as Political Props
The collateral damage of Judicial Performance Art
You are five years old. You are wearing your favorite Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat because it is January in Minneapolis and you are cold. A federal officer’s hand grips your backpack. Someone takes a photograph.
Within hours, that photograph has traveled from a bystander’s phone to the Associated Press wire to the front page of the New York Times to a federal court document where it will remain, searchable and permanent, in the legal database PACER, forever attached to your name.
You did not consent to this. You cannot consent to this. You are five.
This is what happened to Liam Conejo Ramos on January 31, 2026. But the photograph is only the beginning of what was done to him in the name of saving him.
The Arithmetic of Performance
United States District Judge Fred Biery had approximately 480 words to work with when he wrote the habeas corpus decision that would free Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, from ICE detention. The case was, by all accounts, legally straightforward: the government had detained them using what lawyers call “administrative warrants”—essentially permission slips that the executive branch writes to itself—rather than judicial warrants based on probable cause from an independent magistrate. This violates the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation.”
A competent federal judge could have written this decision in a single paragraph: The government detained petitioners without an independent judicial warrant, relying solely on administrative process. This violates the Fourth Amendment. Habeas corpus granted.
That paragraph would have freed Liam just as quickly. It would have been, in the language of appellate courts, “appeal-proof”—anchored in precedent, devoid of unnecessary rhetoric, giving the government nothing to challenge except the law itself.
Judge Biery made different choices with his 480 words.
He invoked Benjamin Franklin’s warning that America is “a republic, if you can keep it.” He compared the Trump administration to King George III, listing grievances from the Declaration of Independence. He deployed the barnyard metaphor of “the fox guarding the henhouse.” He described government officials as possessing “perfidious lust for unbridled power” and being “bereft of human decency.” He cast himself as a “judicial finger in the constitutional dike,” a reference to the Dutch boy who saved his village by plugging a leaking dam with his finger.
And then, below his signature, Judge Biery did something extraordinary: he attached Liam’s photograph—the one showing a federal officer’s hand on the Spider-Man backpack, the blue bunny hat, the child’s face turned toward a black SUV. Underneath the photo, he cited two Bible verses. He did not quote them, but any reader with access to Scripture would know what they say:
Matthew 19:14: “But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: For of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”
Legal scholars who analyzed the decision noted that the Fourth Amendment analysis was “bare bones.” The academic paper examining Judge Biery’s rhetorical history concluded that while “the legal analysis was ‘bare bones,’ it focused on the lack of an independent judicial officer in the seizure process”—the minimum necessary to justify the outcome.
What was not bare bones: the performance.
The Date That Does Not Exist
The decision is dated “February 31st, 2026.”
There is no February 31st. February has 28 days, or 29 in leap years, which 2026 is not. This is not a typo—not a transposed digit or a near-miss on the keyboard. This is a judge signing a document that will determine whether a five-year-old child remains in federal detention without verifying what day it is.
Legal analysts offered charitable interpretations: Judge Biery wrote in haste, prioritizing the immediate release of a child over clerical precision. The error was called “a sad artifact” for critics who would use it as a “proxy for the judge’s supposed lack of rigor.”
But consider what this error reveals about allocation of attention. Judge Biery had time to:
Research the precise wording of grievances against King George III
Select two specific Bible verses that together create a narrative arc from Jesus welcoming children to Jesus weeping
Craft a pun on the word “trumps” (rendering the president’s name in lowercase while using it as a verb: “the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention”)
Locate the Benjamin Franklin quote and the Hans Brinker reference
Format the photograph for attachment to an official court document
He did not have time to verify that the date he was writing existed.
This is not about perfectionism. This is about risk assessment. Because if the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reverses this decision—and legal analysis suggests there is “high risk” of reversal for “impermissible prejudice” based on the judge’s attacks on government officials—Liam Conejo Ramos will not be protected by biblical citations or Revolutionary War metaphors.
He will be subject to re-detention.
The Judge Who Has “A Little Extra to Say”
Fred Biery has been a federal judge since 1994, appointed by President Bill Clinton. Over three decades on the bench, he has cultivated a reputation. A 2023 profile in San Antonio Lawyer magazine described him as “a judge with a little extra to say.” His 2013 opinion in a First Amendment case involving strip club regulations is titled, in some legal circles, “The Case of the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Bikini Top v. The (More) Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Pastie.” The opinion includes the sentence “Does size matter?” and makes numerous puns involving the word “erection” in the context of constitutional protections.
In criminal sentencing hearings, Judge Biery is known for directing defendants to turn and face their family members in the courtroom gallery, creating what observers describe as “dramatic and hopefully life-changing moments.” He has told defendants: “Never F-I-B to the F-B-I.”
This is his brand. His style. His judicial identity.
The Ramos decision was not an aberration forced by constitutional emergency. It was Thursday.
What makes this particular Thursday different is that Judge Biery’s rhetorical performance operated on a five-year-old child who did not ask to be photographed, did not ask to be compared to Jesus Christ, did not ask to become the face of Fourth Amendment violations, and cannot understand that his image is now permanently searchable in federal court databases.
The Pedagogy Argument
Defenders of Judge Biery’s approach invoke the concept of judicial pedagogy—the idea that judges have a duty not merely to decide cases but to “understand, explain and persuade.” In this framework, elaborate opinions serve an educational function, making constitutional principles accessible to the public rather than burying them in technical jargon comprehensible only to lawyers.
The argument has surface appeal. Traditional judicial solemnity has not prevented family separations, has not stopped the use of administrative warrants, has not protected asylum-seeking children from detention. Perhaps, the argument goes, a judge with “a little extra to say” is fulfilling his obligation to explain why the law matters and how it has been violated.
But pedagogy requires identifying the audience. When Judge Biery wrote his decision, who was he teaching?
Not the government. The government lost. The legal reasoning—however bare bones—was sufficient to compel Liam’s release. Additional rhetoric does not make the loss more legally compelling; it only makes it more publicly embarrassing.
Not the Conejo Arias family. They got what they came for: freedom. The Bible verses and historical allusions do not make them more free. The photograph permanently attached to the federal record does not protect them; it exposes them.
Not future judges deciding similar cases. Judicial pedagogy in the traditional sense means writing clear opinions that explain legal reasoning so other judges can apply the same principles. But Judge Biery’s opinion is not a model of careful Fourth Amendment analysis. It is a model of how to use rhetoric to shame the executive branch.
The audience is the public. The New York Times. Barack Obama’s LinkedIn followers. The people who share viral court decisions because they contain satisfying putdowns of political opponents.
This is not pedagogy. This is performance art using a child’s face as the canvas.
The Appellate Risk No One Discusses With Liam
The academic analysis of Judge Biery’s decision identifies specific grounds on which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals might reverse:
Appearance of Bias (Moderate Risk): Under 28 U.S.C. § 455, a judge must recuse himself when “his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Intense rhetoric against “deportation quotas” and characterizations of government officials as driven by “perfidious lust” could suggest the judge pre-judged the case based on policy preferences rather than legal analysis.
Impermissible Prejudice (High Risk): The Fifth Circuit has reversed decisions where rhetoric “unquestionably tarnish[es] the badge of evenhandedness.” Describing government agents as “bereft of human decency” crosses into personal attack rather than legal critique.
The Fifth Circuit is not known for its tolerance of theatrical judicial writing. In United States v. Diggles, the court emphasized that discretionary conditions of supervised release must be “orally pronounced” to ensure proper notice—a focus on procedural exactness that clashes with Judge Biery’s narrative-driven style. The circuit has held that while “a bit of oratory and hyperbole” is permissible in legal writing, it must not cross the line into “impermissible prejudice” that undermines the appearance of judicial neutrality.
Judge Biery has been reversed before. His strip club opinion, despite its elaborate literary allusions, ultimately denied the plaintiff’s preliminary injunction based strictly on controlling Fifth Circuit precedent. The humor was superficial decoration on top of careful legal analysis. In the Ramos case, the legal analysis is “bare bones” and the rhetoric is weight-bearing.
If the Fifth Circuit reverses, here is what happens:
Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained once, photographed, made into a national symbol, freed in a viral court decision, and compared to Jesus Christ by a federal judge, will be subject to re-detention. His family will return to court. The case will be re-litigated. The trauma will be compounded by the public nature of the reversal—the child who was freed will be detained again, and the entire country will watch it happen because Judge Biery ensured the case would be impossible to ignore.
A five-year-old cannot go through this twice.
The February Reversal
Imagine you are an attorney for the government arguing before a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. You stand at the lectern. You begin:
“Your Honors, the district court’s decision below is infected by evident bias and impermissible prejudice. Judge Biery compared the President of the United States to King George III. He described government officials as possessing ‘perfidious lust for unbridled power’ and being ‘bereft of human decency.’ He attached a photograph of the minor child to create emotional manipulation rather than relying on legal analysis. He cited Scripture to suggest that our immigration enforcement violates divine law. And perhaps most telling, Your Honors, he signed this decision on February 31st—a date that does not exist—suggesting he was more concerned with crafting memorable rhetoric than with the careful legal analysis this Court requires.”
You do not need to argue that the Fourth Amendment permits administrative warrants. You argue that the judge was biased, that his decision was result-oriented, that his rhetoric reveals a predetermined hostility to the executive branch that prevented fair adjudication.
The Fifth Circuit has reversed for less.
The Exploitation Triangle
Three entities used Liam Conejo Ramos without asking his permission:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which detained him using constitutionally deficient warrants, moved him from Minnesota to Texas, and held him in a facility outside San Antonio. ICE Chief Marcos Charles defended the detention, stating that the agency provided “top-notch care” superior to what social services could offer. Liam was five. He was not consulted about whether he preferred detention with top-notch care to remaining with his father in Minnesota.
Judge Fred Biery, who granted Liam’s habeas petition but could not resist transforming the case into a theatrical rebuke of the Trump administration, permanently attaching the child’s photograph to the federal record and framing it with religious iconography that compares the child’s suffering to Christ’s. Liam was not asked whether he wanted to be a symbol. He was not asked whether he wanted his face in federal court databases forever. He was not asked whether he wanted to be used to teach constitutional principles to the American public.
The Public, which shared the photograph, celebrated the decision, turned Liam into a meme of resistance against executive overreach, and allowed him to be used as emotional ammunition in political debates he is too young to understand. When former President Barack Obama shared the New York Times analysis of the decision on LinkedIn, praising it as “a useful reminder of what our federal courts SHOULD be doing,” he was celebrating a decision that places a child at high risk of appellate reversal and re-detention. Obama will not suffer if the Fifth Circuit reverses. Liam will.
At no point in this triangle did anyone center the question: What does Liam need to stay free and safe?
The Professional Standard
Every first-year law student learns a fundamental principle: your first duty is to your client. Not to constitutional principles in the abstract. Not to public education. Not to political resistance. Not to your reputation or your place in history.
To your client.
Judge Biery’s client, in a functional sense, was Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son. His duty was to free them in a way that would keep them free—to write a decision so legally airtight, so thoroughly grounded in precedent, so carefully reasoned that the Fifth Circuit would have nothing to reverse except the law itself.
Instead, Judge Biery wrote a decision that:
Minimizes legal analysis in favor of rhetorical performance
Contains multiple grounds for reversal based on appearance of bias
Includes a factual impossibility (February 31st) that symbolizes careless attention to detail
Permanently exposes the child by attaching his photograph to federal records
Transforms the child into a symbol without his consent or understanding
If this decision is reversed on appeal, Liam goes back into detention. The bunny hat photograph gets used again. The trauma compounds. The family becomes a symbol of judicial failure instead of constitutional vindication.
All because Judge Biery wanted to write a memorable opinion.
The Distinction Between Outcome and Process
It is possible—necessary, even—to hold two thoughts simultaneously:
The outcome was correct. The government violated the Fourth Amendment. Liam and his father should have been freed immediately.
The process was exploitative. Judge Biery used a child’s trauma as raw material for judicial performance art, prioritized theatrical rhetoric over careful legal analysis, and created unnecessary appellate risk that could result in the child’s re-detention.
The first thought does not excuse the second.
Consider the surgeon who successfully removes a tumor but is so focused on demonstrating his technique for the observation gallery that he forgets to properly close the incision. The tumor is gone—that’s good. The patient now faces infection risk from the sloppy closure—that’s inexcusable. The surgeon’s duty was not merely to achieve the correct medical outcome but to protect the patient from all reasonably foreseeable harm, including harm caused by the surgeon’s own ego.
Judge Biery removed the constitutional violation. But he left Liam exposed to:
Re-detention if the decision is reversed
Permanent loss of privacy through the attached photograph
Public identification as a detention victim that will follow him through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood
Use as a political symbol by adults with agendas he cannot comprehend
The correct outcome does not absolve these failures.
What the Alternative Would Have Looked Like
Imagine a different version of January 31, 2026. Judge Biery receives the habeas petition. The legal violation is obvious: no independent judicial warrant, clear Fourth Amendment violation, binding precedent requiring release. He writes:
“Petitioners were detained without a judicial warrant based on probable cause as required by the Fourth Amendment. The government’s administrative warrant process fails to satisfy the constitutional requirement for review by a neutral and detached magistrate. See [exhaustive citation to Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit precedent]. The detention violates established law. Habeas corpus is GRANTED. Petitioners shall be released immediately.”
Then he spends the next fifteen pages exhaustively analyzing every relevant case, distinguishing potential counterarguments, building redundant alternative holdings, and creating a legal fortress that the Fifth Circuit cannot penetrate. He does not attach photographs. He does not cite Bible verses. He does not compare the president to King George III.
The decision is boring. It will not be shared on social media. The New York Times will not write about it. Barack Obama will not celebrate it on LinkedIn. Legal scholars will not analyze it as performance art.
But Liam Conejo Ramos will be free, protected by an appeal-proof decision, able to grow up without his face permanently attached to federal court records, able to be a child rather than a symbol.
That version of January 31 never happened. Judge Biery made different choices.
The Question of Judicial Restraint in Crisis
The hardest question remains: What should judges do when constitutional violations are systematic and obvious, when traditional judicial solemnity has failed to prevent the detention of children, when administrative warrants are routinely used in defiance of the Fourth Amendment?
This is not a hypothetical. The detention of Liam Conejo Ramos was part of what Zena Stenvik, superintendent of Columbia Heights schools, described as an “occupying surge” of federal agents that left her district “shattered.” The implication is clear: this was not an isolated mistake but a pattern of enforcement that treated constitutional requirements as optional obstacles.
Perhaps judges should respond to systematic violations with more than dry citations to precedent. Perhaps embarrassment and public shame are necessary enforcement mechanisms when legal precedent alone has failed to compel compliance. Perhaps the rule of law requires not just neutral adjudication but theatrical denunciation when government actors demonstrate contempt for constitutional limits.
But if we accept this argument—if we conclude that judges should deploy rhetorical weapons when faced with systematic constitutional violations—we must also accept the consequences:
Judges decide which cases deserve “performance art” treatment, creating a subjective standard for when theatrical rhetoric is justified
What counts as an “obvious violation” becomes a matter of personal judgment rather than legal analysis
The line between legitimate pedagogy and partisan grandstanding becomes impossible to police
Every judge gets to determine when constitutional violations are egregious enough to warrant abandoning judicial restraint
And most importantly: children become acceptable collateral damage in these rhetorical battles. Their faces, their names, their trauma, their privacy—all become available as raw materials for judges who have decided that this particular moment in constitutional history justifies extraordinary measures.
The judge who attaches a photograph of a five-year-old to shame the executive branch is making a calculation: the child’s long-term privacy matters less than the short-term political impact of the decision.
That calculation may or may not be correct as a matter of constitutional strategy. But it was never the judge’s calculation to make. The child did not consent. The child cannot consent. The child is five years old.
The Arithmetic of Attention
Return to those 480 words that Judge Biery had to work with. Subtract the space used for:
Benjamin Franklin: 21 words
Declaration of Independence grievances: 47 words
“Perfidious lust for unbridled power”: 8 words
“Fox guarding the henhouse”: 11 words
“Judicial finger in the constitutional dike”: 8 words
Bible verse citations: 4 words
That is 99 words spent on performance rather than legal protection. Twenty percent of the entire decision devoted to theatrical rhetoric that creates appellate risk without adding legal force.
Those 99 words could have been used to:
Cite additional Fourth Amendment precedent
Distinguish potential counterarguments
Build alternative holdings
Strengthen the legal fortress protecting Liam from re-detention
Judge Biery made a choice about how to allocate scarce space in a brief decision. He chose memorable rhetoric over legal thoroughness. He chose his reputation over the child’s protection.
The decision is dated February 31st. Judge Biery exists in a reality where dates are flexible, where legal analysis can be “bare bones” while rhetoric is elaborate, where a child’s photograph can be permanently attached to federal records because the judge believes the symbolism serves a higher purpose.
But Liam Conejo Ramos does not live in Judge Biery’s theatrical reality. He lives in the Fifth Circuit, where decisions are reversed for impermissible prejudice, where appearances of bias matter, where clerks notice when judges sign decisions on dates that do not exist.
If the Fifth Circuit reverses, Liam faces re-detention not because the Fourth Amendment permits administrative warrants, but because a judge prioritized his performance over the child’s protection.
Conclusion: The Cost of Poetic Justice
On February 3, 2026, the New York Times published A.O. Scott’s analysis of Judge Biery’s decision under the headline “In Under 500 Words, a Judge Weaponized Wit to Free the Child Detained by ICE.” The article celebrated the decision as “a passionate, erudite and at times mischievous piece of prose” and “a thorough scourging of the Trump administration’s approach to governance.”
The article did not ask whether Liam Conejo Ramos wanted to be freed through weaponized wit. It did not ask whether his photograph should have been attached to a federal court document. It did not ask what happens to the child if the decision is reversed. It did not calculate the appellate risk created by the judge’s rhetoric.
Instead, it annotated the wordplay. It explained the literary allusions. It praised the theatrical elements. It treated the decision as a text to be appreciated rather than as a document that will determine whether a five-year-old child remains free.
This is what happens when we celebrate judicial performance art: we forget there are real people at the center of these cases, people who did not audition for roles in the judge’s constitutional drama, people who will bear the consequences long after the judge’s wit has been weaponized and the viral moment has passed.
Liam Conejo Ramos deserved a judge who would free him immediately and protect him permanently. He got a judge who freed him memorably and exposed him unnecessarily.
The outcome was correct. The process was exploitation. These truths coexist.
And on February 31st—a date that will never arrive, that cannot arrive, that exists only in Judge Biery’s theatrical reality—a five-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat became a symbol, a prop, a teaching tool, a piece of performance art.
He never asked to be saved this way.
This is one of the most nuanced takes Ive read on judicial performance vs actual protection. The arithmetic of attention section really got me - 99 words on theatrics instead of building an apeal-proof fortress. Reminds me of a college professor who spent more time making lectures entertaining than teaching the actual material. The child deserves freedom without becomming a symbol for adults' political battles.