The FBI arrest of a Milwaukee local judge on felony counts related to immigration enforcement is an unwarranted and dangerous escalation by the Trump administration.
For the FBI to arrest someone at their workplace, they usually have to have been charged with something especially dire. For Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, this offense was allegedly refusing to hand defendant Eduardo Flores Ruiz, who had just had a hearing before the judge, over to an ICE task force that showed up in her courtroom. Dugan was charged with two federal felonies and taken into custody, which FBI Director Kash Patel gloated about on social media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, for whom advancing the MAGA movement’s political agenda supersedes ensuring the equal and fair administration of justice, went on TV to say: “no one is above the law.” Aside from the dissonance of serving under a president who was only able to evade extremely serious federal charges by being elected to the White House, Bondi either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that Dugan was in fact attempting to ensure the integrity of the legal process.
Flores may have been guilty of his misdemeanor charges, or he may not. The point of the proceedings before Dugan was to establish that and, if appropriate, what his punishment should be. Because of ICE’s detention, that won’t happen, which is bad for Flores, bad for any alleged victims — who won’t see justice — and bad for the larger community as immigrants and their families begin to see the courthouse as a dangerous place to be.
Having ICE at the courthouse means immigrants won’t report crimes, assist law enforcement, or show up for their own court hearings, which makes everyone less safe, not to mention completely undercuts the baseline American ideal of due process, not something that Bondi and her cadre seem to hold in very high esteem.
It’s ironic that Dugan was charged with “obstructing a proceeding” when the only people obstructing an official proceeding here were the task force that showed up to take Flores into custody. This task force, per the government’s own criminal complaint, consisted of just one ICE agent plus one Customs and Border Protection agent, two FBI agents and two DEA agents.
We wonder if six federal agents, four of whom are not in immigration-focused agencies, could have found a better use of their time than detaining a single person at a courthouse. Now, more federal resources will be wasted on this fiasco as the government tries to move forward with a prosecution of a sitting judge whose alleged crime was simply letting a defendant walk through a different hallway.
Patel, Bondi and Trump are overplaying their hand, especially as the president’s immigration policy approval keeps dropping amid public outrage over authoritarian assaults on due process and separation of powers. Going to war with the judiciary is not going to end well, especially given the volume of federal judges, including Trump-appointed and conservative judges and the Supreme Court’s own conservative majority, that are questioning the administration’s power grab.
Federal judges aren’t likely to look favorably on this flagrant assertion of power in arresting a popular county-level counterpart just for not letting her courtroom become an ICE staging ground.
