A Wisconsin Judge Faces Federal Trial This Week for Daring to Help an Immigrant Avoid ICE

When it comes to the enforcement of its draconian, purposefully cruel immigration operations, the second Trump administration has for a while now been searching for a sacrificial lamb it can use as an example in its vendetta against “activist judges” and anyone generally willing to lift a finger in an attempt to ward off the worst abuses of a system that Amnesty International says is currently sticking people in 2×2 cages to bake in the Florida sun. This week in Wisconsin federal court, the administration perhaps finds the woman it wants to use as that example: Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan. She’s facing blatantly politicized felony charges of “obstructing a proceeding of a federal agency and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest,” stemming from an April incident in which she allegedly advised a defendant and his legal counsel in her court to exit via a side door in an effort to avoid federal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the eyes of Donald Trump’s administration, this is a crime worthy of six years imprisonment, if Dugan is convicted: Telling a migrant how they might avoid being arrested in a state courthouse, where agents of ICE have no business being in the first place.

There’s no other way to say it: Judge Hannah Dugan has been railroaded into this position, offered up as a threat to all other judges in the U.S. who would dare not just to aid immigrant defendants in some way, but to show the smallest bit of backbone in resisting any impulse of the federal Justice Department’s efforts to brutalize immigrants in their own deportation effort. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team wants to convict and imprison Judge Dugan in the hopes that it will have a chilling effect on any other judge defying its will in some way. As Bondi put it earlier this year: “Some of these judges think they’re above the law. They are not. We will come after you and prosecute you. We will find you.”

Ah yes, because it’s notably difficult to hunt down and “find” a county judge as they preside in their chambers. Bondi is making it sound as if her law enforcement apparatus had to crack some kind of cipher in order to come after a civil servant—a very popular civil servant, at that. Judge Hannah Dugan was elected in 2016, easily beating the incumbent appointee of former Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker, and proved so popular that she ran unopposed for reelection in 2022. Her current term was due to be up in 2028. She’s spent her career with a focus on low-income communities, graduating in 1987 from the University of Wisconsin Law School and working afterward for Legal Action of Wisconsin, a group dedicated to providing free legal representation to those in need. The now 66-year-old judge has been on administrative leave since April, awaiting the start of this week’s trial.

At the heart of the court case is Judge Dugan’s intent in reportedly suggesting that the defendant in her courtroom, Mexican national Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, exit via a side door. The prosecution alleges that Dugan did this in willful defiance of ICE agents in order to prevent their arrest of Flores-Ruiz, who was in court that day on a misdemeanor domestic battery charge after an altercation with a roommate. In court this afternoon, they presented slides on “Defendant’s Intent,” saying that they would prove that “the defendant intended to prevent the individual’s discovery or arrest,” and “the defendant did so corruptly, that is, with the purpose of wrongfully impeding a proceeding.” Notably, the defense countered by amusingly beginning their own opening statements with an interactive photo of the courthouse’s exit, which showed how the “side hallway exit” is ultimately less than 11 feet away from the main exit door. Which does tend to put this entire case in perspective: We are talking about whether a Wisconsin judge will face six years in prison for allegedly telling an immigrant to exit through a door several feet away from the main door.