Jury selection is complete and a federal trial gets underway Monday for Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan. She is accused of helping a man try to evade arrest by immigration authorities at the county courthouse last April.
A grand jury indicted Dugan the following month. She faces one count of obstructing a proceeding, a felony, and another count of concealing an individual to prevent an arrest, a misdemeanor. She has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Dugan could face up to six years in prison if convicted.
Prosecutors offer their version of what happened
According to the criminal complaint, ICE agents wanted to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national, for being in the U.S. unlawfully. They determined he'd be appearing before Judge Dugan on April 18, on misdemeanor charges of domestic assault.
When agents showed up to arrest Flores-Ruiz, prosecutors say Dugan falsely told agents they needed a judicial warrant. They say she directed ICE agents to leave the hallway and go to the chief judge's office. She allegedly addressed Flores-Ruiz's case off the record while ICE agents were in the chief judge's office. She directed Flores-Ruiz and his counsel to leave the courtroom through a non-public jury door, and she told Flores-Ruiz's counsel that he could appear by Zoom at his next court date.
The court papers allege that Flores-Ruiz and his attorney ultimately ended up in the public hallway, where ICE agents saw them. Agents chased Flores-Ruiz outside and eventually caught him and arrested him. He has since been deported.
Defense attorneys say Dugan will be vindicated
NPR reached out to Judge Dugan and her attorneys, who declined to comment. However, before her arraignment, members of her defense team issued a statement: "As she said after her unnecessary arrest, Judge Dugan asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court."
Dugan's attorneys argue in court documents that court policy on immigration enforcement at the courthouse was in flux. They say Dugan was following draft protocols sent by the chief judge which required her to refer ICE agents to a supervisor.
Tony Cotton is a Wisconsin criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the case.
"If what she was doing was explaining to the agents that there's a different protocol that needs to be followed," says Cotton, "and she was permitting the immigrant to use a different door, not to obstruct the police, but to reduce the confrontation in the courtroom, then it would bear on what her intent was."
Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and current law professor at Loyola University, agrees. "Really all this case is about is what was going on in the judge's head," Levenson says. "Whether she was trying to conceal someone, whether she was trying to impede a proceeding, or whether she was trying to do what she thought was her job, run her courtroom, deal with her cases, and try to keep from having the Department of Homeland Security interfere with that."
An unprecedented political context
Levenson says until President Trump's first term, courthouses were by and large off-limits to federal authorities, including immigration agents.
"There was this general understanding and respect that ICE could do their arrests, they could go to people's homes, they could take them off the streets, but the courthouses should not be disrupted for lots of reasons, because you don't want people not to come to their court proceedings," Levenson says.
Now, with the Trump administration's ramping up of immigration enforcement, all that has gone out the window, she says.
Top officials in the Trump administration, and President Trump himself, have applauded the prosecution. The Department of Homeland Security called Dugan an "activist judge" on X.
So Dugan's lawyers likely signed onto the case to send a message, says John Gross, director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School. "[Her lawyers are] really just the who's who of criminal defense, federal litigators in Wisconsin," he says.
Dugan also retained former Republican solicitor general Paul Clement, a "legal wunderkind," who's originally from Wisconsin, likely in the case of an appeal.
This is not the first time that federal agents have arrested a judge during Trump's time in office. In 2018, a judge in Massachusetts faced federal charges in similar circumstances, for allegedly allowing someone to leave a courthouse through a back door to evade arrest by ICE. The Biden Justice Department eventually dropped the felony charges and instead referred the judge to a commission on judicial conduct
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