By J. Joaquin Faxedas, Special to The Sentinel

As we sit in the comfort of our homes a little more than a week after the federal government's Easter-eve raid of a family home in Miami, we should all be feeling less secure than we felt on Good Friday. When federal agents in full battle gear, armed with automatic weapons, crashed into that house, what they broke was far more precious than the front door.

Respected constitutional scholars from California to New York have seriously questioned the legality of the actions taken by the Justice Department.

Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School wrote in a recent New York Times article: "Ms. Reno's decision to take the law as well as the child into her own hands seems worse than a political blunder ... her decision strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty." (The italics are my emphasis.) USA Today calls Tribe "probably the most influential living American constitutional scholar" and notes that his treatises on constitutional law are often cited by the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the supreme courts of India, Germany, Russia and Canada, among others.

Alan M. Dershowitz, in an article published by the Los Angeles Times, sounded a loud and urgent alarm: "For whatever reason the government chose not to seek a court order following an adversarial hearing, its actions confirm a dangerous precedent: that the executive branch of the government has the authority to break into a citizen's home in a contested dispute without giving that citizen the opportunity first to present his side to a court for resolution of the dispute."

We should pay careful attention to what these scholars are writing. But it does not take a constitutional scholar to know that something profoundly disturbing occurred this past Easter weekend in Miami.

Any law student who has stayed awake during constitutional law knows that the question is not even close: The government's action was illegal. There was no appropriate judicial intervention before the raid. An appeal was pending before the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta. Forty-eight hours before the raid, that court had issued a preliminary order that strongly criticized the Immigration and Naturalization Service's failure to consider Elian Gonzalez's application for political asylum, granted an injunction prohibiting the child's removal from the United States, declined to grant an order transferring custody requested by the government and stated, among other things, that the child had "separate and independent interests in seeking asylum."

The order must have caught the government by surprise. It certainly spurred it into action. The heck with the courts -- call in the storm troopers.

The fact that the polls show that the majority of Americans agree with the end result does not excuse the actions of the Justice Department. It is axiomatic that when fundamental rights are involved, the ends never justify the means, because the next time the result may not be what we like -- it may horrify us.

We should be particularly alarmed if the end result of an abuse of executive power is popular (and even the right and proper result), because that is when we start to slip toward what constitutional scholars call the tyranny of the majority -- the majority tends to trample on the constitutional rights of the minority, especially if that minority is a single person.

Leaders who govern by polls are particularly susceptible to this evil. Tyrants are usually very popular, especially at the beginning. That is how they become tyrants.

I was one of those law students who was wide awake nearly 30 years ago during Professor James Quarles' lectures on constitutional law at the University of Florida. My attention might have drifted during contracts. Estates and trusts put me to sleep. But I was enthralled by constitutional law.

The reason I found it so fascinating is that, 11 years earlier, at the age of 10, I had escaped Fidel Castro's Cuba with my widowed mother and three younger siblings, and, although I was young, I remember the crowds screaming, "Paredon" ("To the firing squad"). I remember my Catholic school taken over by Castro's troops. The priests rounded up in the courtyard and taken away. Armed soldiers breaking into unarmed people's homes. Everything changing so quickly -- so violently. That is why concepts such as due process of law, judicial review, checks and balances, a government of limited powers had -- and continue to have -- such tangible meaning for me. That is why I hold them sacred.

Everyone who loves this country, everyone who understands and cherishes the idea of ordered liberty under the rule of law, should be very disturbed by what the government did. We may be thankful that no one was seriously hurt. We may all agree that it is a good thing for a child to be with his father. We may all like the end result. This time.