Trump DOJ’s Prosecution of a Wisconsin Judge Is a Travesty 

In a bizarre case, a Wisconsin jury, after a four-day trial earlier this month, found Judge Hannah Dugan, a state court judge, guilty of felony obstruction for helping a Mexican national evade immigration officials during an arrest attempt at the courthouse where she presided. Dugan faces up to five years’ imprisonment for the crime. 

The jury anomalously acquitted the jurist of the lesser misdemeanor charge of “concealing an individual to prevent an arrest.” By acquitting the defendant of the lesser included offense, the jury may have delivered what lawyers call irretrievably inconsistent verdicts that impliedly acquitted her of the felony. This possibility will have to await further legal developments. 

Federal agents led Dugan, in handcuffs, from the courthouse in April after she had ushered Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, facing misdemeanor battery charges, out of her courtroom through a side door. An immigration judge had issued an administrative warrant for his arrest.  

“All she did was send him out into the hallway with his lawyer,” Dugan’s lawyer repeatedly stressed to the jury during the trial. 

Her conviction marks a win for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice, which sought to portray Judge Dugan’s actions as evidence of a politicized justice system. But the prosecution is lawfare, a weaponized salvo aimed at an independent judiciary, since the entire flap might well have been resolved with a conversation between the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney and the chief judge of Dugan’s court.  

The facts are these: On April 18, Flores-Ruiz appeared in the Milwaukee court for a scheduled immigration hearing. Six officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Agency were in the courtroom to arrest him—a now-familiar tactic in which the feds swarm a long-scheduled immigration hearing, citizenship swearing-in ceremony, or a pending marriage to an American national, and try to sweep the subject away. According to an FBI affidavit, Dugan became “visibly angry” about the type of arrest warrant that had been issued and told the officers to report to the chief judge. While they were there, Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer to a private exit used by jurors.  

After her conviction, Dugan’s legal team maintained their client’s innocence. “While we are disappointed by today’s outcome, the prosecution’s failure to secure convictions on both counts demonstrates the opportunity we have to clear Judge Dugan’s name and show she did nothing wrong in this matter,” they said. 

Jubilant over the conviction, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the judge had “betrayed her oath” when she “obstructed federal law enforcement during an immigration enforcement operation.” Writing on X, he declared: “Today, a federal jury of her peers found her guilty and sent a clear message: the American people respect law and order. Nobody is above the law.” Tell that one to the Supreme Court. Blanche forgets that judges generally have the authority to exercise reasonable control over their courtrooms, allowing jurists to maintain order. 

Judge Dugan should not have been arrested or prosecuted for seeking to maintain order in her courtroom—and in the Milwaukee County Courthouse—by deciding how a defendant who had appeared before her should exit. Where is the necessary criminal intent? The bizarre jury verdict should be overturned promptly by the trial judge or, if necessary, on appeal to the Seventh Circuit.  

Was there trial error? The most damning evidence against Dugan was presented by her colleague, Milwaukee County Judge Kristela Cervera, who testified that judges shouldn’t help defendants evade arrest. Such testimony is a no-no under settled rules of evidence. I do not know whether the defense objected to this testimony and moved to strike it from the record, but even if they did not, the error is grounds for the appellate court to order a new trial.  

Dugan has not yet been sentenced, and it seems doubtful she will be imprisoned for any significant period. However, even with a minimal sentence, the consequences of her federal felony conviction are devastating for the 65-year-old judge, including removal from the bench and automatic disbarment. 

If there are problems with Dugan’s actions, they should be addressed by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, the independent agency that investigates and disciplines allegations of misconduct against Wisconsin judges. 

From the start, Dugan’s arrest and prosecution smacked of politics; Blanche has referred to it as “war” between Trump and elements of the judiciary. Contrast this with Blanche’s strange meeting with Jeffrey Epstein collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell and her transfer to a much more comfortable prison earlier this year. 

Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel took to social media to post a photo of Dugan in handcuffs and signaled that the jurist would be prosecuted on evidence that she “obstructed an immigration arrest operation last week.” Yet the immigrant targeted by authorities during the mid-April incident was arrested by federal agents moments after Dugan directed him to a public space outside her courtroom. He did not escape. He was eventually deported to Mexico. If she was aiding a criminal to avoid arrest, she didn’t do a very good job of it. 

The evidence was that Dugan had questions about the agents and the validity of their “administrative warrant.” It may be that Dugan handled the chaotic circumstance imperfectly. That she should be handcuffed was absurd, and her prosecution is a travesty. It is not as though she directed the migrant to a fire escape, hid him in her car or home, or handed him a bus ticket to get out of town. 

It’s unclear whether Dugan belongs in this pantheon, but history is replete with Americans who engaged in civil disobedience to protest what they considered an unprincipled federal government. Their punishments varied. (Dugan’s attorneys offered no hint that their client was involved in an act of civil disobedience, which would not have been an extenuating circumstance.) 

Famously, the Berrigan brothers—Daniel, a Jesuit priest, and Philip, of the Josephite order—led the antiwar and antidraft movements during the Vietnam War, and largely got away with it.  

In May 1968, the brothers, along with seven Catholic protesters, burned the records of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board with homemade napalm. Their arrest, trial, and three-year prison sentence propelled the Berrigans to national prominence. In January 1971, Richard Nixon’s administration indicted the Berrigans and others for conspiracy, including charges of planning to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels in federal buildings in Washington, D.C. After 60 hours of deliberation, the jury failed to reach a verdict, forcing a mistrial.

After Vietnam, the brothers’ Catholic resistance had a new focus on nuclear disarmament. In September 1980, they led a group into a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, that damaged the nose cones for Mark 12A nuclear warheads and poured blood on company records. They were sentenced to three to 10 years, but after an appeal, the case was brought before a sympathetic judge who sentenced them to 23 months’ probation. 

Civil disobedience has come from the right, as well. A novel 1997 ruling startled both sides in the abortion debate when a federal judge acquitted a retired Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop, George E Lynch, and a Franciscan friar, Brother Christopher Moscinski, after the pair had blocked access to a Westchester County clinic because they were motivated by “conscience-driven religious belief.” 

The defendants faced criminal contempt of an order that they comply with a 1994 Federal law protecting the entries and exits of abortion clinics. The judge, invoking a 1970 Supreme Court decision in favor of a Vietnam War conscientious objector, said that the men had been acting on “sincere, genuine, objectively based” religious convictions.  

In February 1996, the court issued a permanent injunction against the two, prohibiting them from blocking the clinic’s driveway. He declined to order fines or create a buffer zone. In April, Bishop Lynch sat against the clinic doors. In July, the judge found the bishop in civil contempt but declined to impose further sanctions. 

In August 1996, the two were again arrested for sitting in the clinic driveway. This time, the government asked the court to find them in criminal contempt of its February injunction, for which they could have served up to six months in jail. 

The judge absolved the pair of criminal contempt, saying they had not defied him “willfully,” conduct he defined as having “bad purpose,” offering the hypothetical case of defying the Dred Scott decision by refusing to return a runaway slave as an expression of moral belief.  

He also cited jury nullification. Citing the 1735 case of John Peter Zenger, the New York editor charged with seditious libel for publishing political criticism, the judge noted that a trial jury had refused to convict, despite the defendant’s guilt. 

Opponents of legal abortion declared the decision was a victory for free speech. But abortion-rights supporters reacted with alarm. “It’s an off-the-wall, scary decision,” said Donna Lieberman, of the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

Whether Dugan was engaging in civil disobedience or merely trying to maintain decorum during a tense situation remains unclear. Still, in either case, the judge has ordered a post-trial briefing on a defense motion to set aside the jury verdict. The judge should grant Judge Dugan’s lawyers’ motion. A politically independent Justice Department would never have brought the case. Judge Dugan’s conviction is an all-too-familiar example of Trump’s weaponization of the justice system.