U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves fiercely criticized President Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary in a speech Thursday, likening some of his rebukes to tactics that had been used by the Ku Klux Klan and segregationists.

“We are now eyewitnesses to the third great assault on our judiciary,” Reeves said, according to a copy of the speech obtained by BuzzFeed News. Reeves, who is a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, delivered the speech Thursday at his alma mater, the University of Virginia School of Law, after being awarded its Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law.

“When politicians attack courts as ‘dangerous,’ ‘political’ and guilty of ‘egregious overreach,’ you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South,” said Reeves, quoting Trump’s repeated criticisms of judges and the courts. (The speech’s footnotes cite the president’s tweets, speeches and more.)

“When the powerful accuse courts of ‘open[ing] up our country to potential terrorists,’ you can hear the Southern Manifesto’s authors, smearing the judiciary for simply upholding the rights of black folk,” Reeves went on, referring to a 1956 manifesto by Southern congressmen rebuking the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark anti-segregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education.

“When lawmakers say ‘we should get rid of judges,’ you can hear segregationist Senators, writing bills to strip courts of their power. And when the Executive Branch calls our courts and their work ‘stupid,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘incompetent,’ ‘a laughingstock,’ and a ‘complete and total disgrace,’ you can hear the slurs and threats of executives like George Wallace, echoing into the present,” he added, referring to the pro-segregation Alabama governor elected in 1962.

Such pointed criticism of the president is unusual from sitting judges, who tend to abide by a judicial ethics code of impartiality. Reeves has used strong language in judicial opinions before, notably in blocking a 15-week abortion ban in his state last year.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg faced backlash, and eventually had to apologize, in 2016 for criticizing then-candidate Trump.