On Wednesday morning at 26 Federal Plaza, the hallways outside of immigration courtrooms were, for one of the first times since last summer, absent their regular sentries: Groups of masked, tattooed, thick-necked federal goons whose job it was to identify immigrants attending their court hearings and rip them away from their family members and friends before shuttling them back to a lurid holding cell on the building's 10th floor, an extraordinary rendition in the country's largest city.
The government officers had, for now at least, retreated to their offices, after a federal judge prohibited the arrest of immigrants at courthouse hearings, ruling that the Department of Homeland Security was now in violation of its own rules regarding these arrests.