President Donald Trump's civil rights chief, Harmeet Dhillon, took to the right-wing Newsmax channel on Friday to bash a magistrate judge who blocked the ongoing detention of Minnesota activists charged with conspiracy against rights for protesting inside a church where an ICE official worked.

"When you go in front of a magistrate with these types of charges, it's not known to the people who are being charged in advance, that's the beginning of the process to get an arrest warrant," said Dhillon. "We made a presentation to the magistrate judge, two of my prosecutors worked tirelessly from Sunday night until presenting on Tuesday with the U.S. attorney's office, and the attorney general was right on the scene as well. And the magistrate judge, who is married to someone who works for Attorney General Keith Ellison, who has had a lot to say about ICE, and a lot to say about our FACE Act theory, declined to give us all that we were asking for."

"So that's just part of the process, there are many other steps in this process, and there are other ways to pursue charges," she continued. "I personally think this magistrate judge abdicated his duty, he should have looked more carefully at the evidence. Unfortunately, a lot of these judicial officers, and he's an inferior judicial officer, he's not an Article III judge, are unfamiliar with the FACE Act's protection of houses of worship, because prior administrations have never pursued it."

These remarks shocked Institute for Justice civil rights attorney Patrick Jaicomo, who took to X to express his reaction.

"It is bad form for any lawyer to attack a judge, rather than his ruling," wrote Jaicomo. "But it’s absurd for a DOJ lawyer to attack a magistrate judge for being a non-Article-III judge while DOJ sanctions ICE agents writing their own 'warrants' based on 'orders' from executive-branch 'judges.'"

The organizer of the church protest, Nekima Levy Armstrong, herself an attorney, has gone on record saying that they did not enter Cities Church intending to disrupt the sermon, and only began chanting and loudly protesting when the pastor escalated the situation upon realizing they were anti-ICE activists.

Reaction was swift and brutal online after news broke that the Department of Justice sought to investigate Minnesota mother Renee Good for criminal liability even after her death – a move that elicited an “extremely rare” judicial rejection.

According to a report in MS NOW, aides to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche directed the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI agents in Minnesota to shift a civil rights investigation into Good’s fatal encounter with law enforcement toward a criminal probe of the deceased woman. A federal judge ultimately rejected the proposed warrant, despite the low standard of evidence needed, the report noted.

Social media users quickly reacted Friday night and appeared stunned and outraged.

“A judge had to inform these sick freaks that you can’t conduct a criminal investigation into a dead woman,” political commentator Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host, told her followers on X.

“There is no bottom with these people,” investigative reporter Ali Winston added in his own social media post.

Author Jennifer Aaron Valent wrote in an X post that the country is being run by “an administration of lawless fools.”

“That should put some DOJ prosecutors in jail,” senior economist Dean Baker posted Friday. Attorney Robin J. Leader wrote bluntly, “This is absolutely disgusting. The DOJ has been completely corrupted by this President and Administration.”

Writer Keith Murphy added, “Shocking. This would devastate most administrations....But Trump's is so wildly corrupt that it's like a walk in the park.” While former NFL player Jumbo Elliott summed up the outrage in one word: “Ghouls.”

Trump suffered a humiliating week of defeats that exposed cracks in his iron-fisted façade, legal experts said Friday.

This week, President Donald Trump "suffered a string of defeats that exposed the real limits of his power at home and abroad," noted Slate's Marc Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick on Friday.

For starters, the Justice Department threw in the towel on its illegal bid to install loyalist Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney after a judge delivered a scorching rebuke, calling her conduct "wildly unprofessional" and accusing her of "masquerading" in defiance of court orders. The blistering opinion, penned by a Trump appointee, was so brutal it effectively ended the charade without even imposing discipline, they said.

"This was one of the most incandescent judicial opinions I think I have ever seen," said Stern.

Lithwick later added: "The really important thing here is that, in a world in which these folks act as though they have boundless impunity to do what they want, it is incredibly important for judges to say no. It’s the cornerstone of how we think about the judicial role."

She called Halligan's loss a "historic dressing-down of somebody who thought they were made of Teflon."

And the humiliations kept coming.

Trump abandoned his bombastic threats to seize Greenland through military force or crippling tariffs after broad pushback, particularly from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's fiery Davos speech. The president's eye-popping retreat left him with nothing — the NATO access he claimed as a victory already existed under current agreements, the legal experts said. He torched global markets and terrified allies for the status quo.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court slammed the brakes on Trump's attempt to purge Federal Reserve Chair Lisa Cook, with justices appearing stunned at how far he'd pushed their limits. The three-front collapse revealed an uncomfortable truth, they said: Trump crumbles when confronted with real consequences.

As Minneapolis residents continue protesting ICE raids on immigrant communities, the broader lesson for America is that resistance works.

"The truth is that he’s weak. He is not the muscular president he pretends to be on television. When someone says no, and uses tools at their disposal to enforce that boundary, he stands down, because he is terrified of being defeated in a way that he can’t spin as a secret victory," said Stern.