Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back. You’ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.

I got a man out of immigration detention last week. Four days, start to finish. Filed a habeas corpus petition on a Thursday night, and by Monday a federal judge had ordered his immediate release. No ankle monitor, no GPS, no conditions. He walked out of the Orange County Jail in Goshen, New York, at 4:09 on Tuesday afternoon. He had been locked up since New Year’s Day. Nearly four months. Now 22 years old, he was brought to this country as a 12-year-old fleeing gang violence in El Salvador after his father was murdered. All he needed was for someone to show up and assert his constitutional rights. The law was on his side the entire time he sat in that cell. Nobody had filed for him.

The reason my client’s case moved so fast is that we drew a judge who had already ruled on the exact same legal question: whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement can detain a person under a mandatory detention statute that Congress never intended to apply to people already living in the United States. This judge had already said no. The government’s lawyers knew it and conceded that they could not distinguish our case from the judge’s prior ruling, and she granted........

© Slate