MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN – MAY 15: Milwaukee County Circuit Decide Hannah Dugan walks into the Milwaukee Federal Courthouse on Could 15, 2025 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Decide Dugan has been charged with attempting to assist Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an undocumented immigrant, elude federal arrest whereas he was making an look in her courtroom on April 18.
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Jury choice is full and a federal trial will get underway Monday for Milwaukee County choose Hannah Dugan. She is accused of serving to a person attempt to evade arrest by immigration authorities on the county courthouse final April.
A grand jury indicted Dugan the next month. She faces one depend of obstructing a continuing, a felony, and one other depend of concealing a person to stop an arrest, a misdemeanor. She has pleaded not responsible to the fees. Dugan may withstand six years in jail if convicted.
Prosecutors provide their model of what occurred
In accordance with the legal criticism, ICE brokers needed to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican nationwide, for being within the U.S. unlawfully. They decided he’d be showing earlier than Decide Dugan on April 18, on misdemeanor costs of home assault.
When brokers confirmed as much as arrest Flores-Ruiz, prosecutors say Dugan falsely informed brokers they wanted a judicial warrant. They are saying she directed ICE brokers to depart the hallway and go to the chief choose’s workplace. She allegedly addressed Flores-Ruiz’s case off the document whereas ICE brokers have been within the chief choose’s workplace. She directed Flores-Ruiz and his counsel to depart the courtroom by means of a private jury door, and she or he informed Flores-Ruiz’s counsel that he may seem by Zoom at his subsequent courtroom date.
The courtroom papers allege that Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer in the end ended up within the public hallway, the place ICE brokers noticed them. Brokers chased Flores-Ruiz outdoors and ultimately caught him and arrested him. He has since been deported.
Protection attorneys say Dugan will probably be vindicated
NPR reached out to Decide Dugan and her attorneys, who declined to remark. Nevertheless, earlier than her arraignment, members of her protection group issued a press release: “As she mentioned after her pointless arrest, Decide Dugan asserts her innocence and appears ahead to being vindicated in courtroom.”
Dugan’s attorneys argue in courtroom paperwork that courtroom coverage on immigration enforcement on the courthouse was in flux. They are saying Dugan was following draft protocols despatched by the chief choose which required her to refer ICE brokers to a supervisor.
Tony Cotton is a Wisconsin legal protection lawyer who shouldn’t be concerned within the case.
“If what she was doing was explaining to the brokers that there is a totally different protocol that must be adopted,” says Cotton, “and she or he was allowing the immigrant to make use of a unique door, to not impede the police, however to scale back the confrontation within the courtroom, then it could bear on what her intent was.”
Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and present legislation professor at Loyola College, agrees. “Actually all this case is about is what was occurring within the choose’s head,” Levenson says. “Whether or not she was attempting to hide somebody, whether or not she was attempting to impede a continuing, or whether or not she was attempting to do what she thought was her job, run her courtroom, cope with her circumstances, and attempt to maintain from having the Division of Homeland Safety intrude with that.”
An unprecedented political context
Levenson says till President Trump’s first time period, courthouses have been by and enormous off-limits to federal authorities, together with immigration brokers.
“There was this normal understanding and respect that ICE may do their arrests, they may go to individuals’s properties, they may take them off the streets, however the courthouses shouldn’t be disrupted for plenty of causes, as a result of you do not need individuals to not come to their courtroom proceedings,” Levenson says.
Now, with the Trump administration’s ramping up of immigration enforcement, all that has gone out the window, she says.
Prime officers within the Trump administration, and President Trump himself, have applauded the prosecution. The Division of Homeland Safety called Dugan an “activist judge” on X.
So Dugan’s attorneys doubtless signed onto the case to ship a message, says John Gross, director of the Public Defender Venture on the College of Wisconsin Regulation College. “[Her lawyers are] actually simply the who’s who of legal protection, federal litigators in Wisconsin,” he says.
Dugan additionally retained former Republican solicitor normal Paul Clement, a “legal wunderkind,” who’s initially from Wisconsin, doubtless within the case of an attraction.
This isn’t the primary time that federal brokers have arrested a choose throughout Trump’s time in workplace. In 2018, a judge in Massachusetts faced federal charges in similar circumstances, for allegedly permitting somebody to depart a courthouse by means of a again door to evade arrest by ICE. The Biden Justice Division ultimately dropped the felony costs and as a substitute referred the judge to a fee on judicial conduct
