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Wisconsin judge’s arrest by FBI sends chilling message, scholars and critics say

The arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, an escalation of the fight between President Trump and the judiciary, serves “to intimidate and threaten all judges, state and local, across the country,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former U.S. appeals court judge.

Judge Hannah Dugan in 2017. (Lee Matz/Milwaukee Independent/AP)

Judge Hannah Dugan in 2017. (Lee Matz/Milwaukee Independent/AP)

The escalating fight between President Donald Trump and the judiciary took a new form Friday.

After weeks of mounting questions about whether Trump was defying court orders, the administration arrested a Wisconsin judge and accused her of helping a Mexican immigrant evade arrest by federal agents.

Officers handcuffed Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in public. Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged on the Fox News show “America Reports” about the administration’s willingness to go after judges who “think they’re above the law.” FBI Director Kash Patel began the day by announcing Dugan’s arrest on social media and ended it by posting a photo of agents leading her away.

While many Republican supporters of the president cheered the aggressive actions, critics of the administration said the spectacle sent a chilling message.

“The obvious purpose of the arrest of Judge Dugan on criminal charges is to intimidate and threaten all judges, state and local, across the country,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former U.S. appeals court judge.

Many scholars have dubbed the standoff between Trump and the courts a constitutional crisis. Judges have increasingly expressed alarm at the administration’s dismissive response to orders blocking Trump’s efforts to dismantle federal programs, fire government workers and fast-track deportations.

 

The clash has been starkest in the case of Kilmar Abrego García, wrongly deported to a megaprison in El Salvador last month despite a 2019 order saying he could not be sent to that country. The Supreme Court ruled the administration must facilitate his return, but the administration has dragged its feet, arguing that it is powerless to bring back Abrego García because he’s in foreign custody.

Trump has been quick to denounce judges who rule against him, including calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who ordered the administration not to use a wartime authority to deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang. The president’s demand drew a rebuke from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor who studies judicial conduct, said Dugan’s arrest must be viewed in the broader context of these interactions with the court system.

 

He called the arrest part of a pattern: “An attempt to bludgeon, an attempt to coerce, an attempt to weaken the one branch of government that stands between the executive — the Trump administration — and it doing whatever it wishes to do.”

“These fall into the category of backing the judiciary up against the wall and saying, ‘Nice court system you have here. I’d hate that you see something happen to it,’” Geyh said.

 
Supporters of Dugan hold a rally at the federal courthouse in Milwaukee on Friday. (Lee Matz/Milwaukee Independent/AP)
Supporters of Dugan hold a rally at the federal courthouse in Milwaukee on Friday. (Lee Matz/Milwaukee Independent/AP)

 

 

Trump has tussled with the justice system for years, but his vitriol mushroomed after his first stint in the White House, as he was indicted on dozens of criminal charges in four jurisdictions.

Impeachment has always been a response to judicial misconduct, not judicial rulings, and Geyh said it is extremely unlikely that there is enough support in the House or Senate to impeach or remove the judges that Trump has targeted. Still, he said, Trump’s invocation of the idea puts the judiciary in a dangerous spot.

 

“When the executive branch and the Republican leaders in Congress call out a judge, it’s not just the mechanics of impeachment or legislation that the judge needs to be concerned about,” Geyh said. “It is the entourage of followers that will be threatening the judge’s family [and] the judge’s life.”

Dugan’s arrest fulfilled threats that Trump’s top Justice Department appointees have been making since his return to the White House — to aggressively challenge anyone deemed to be standing in the way of the president’s immigration agenda.

Already, the department has sued ChicagoRochester, New York; and New York state officials over their sanctuary policies and, in January, launched an investigation of an Upstate New York sheriff’s office that officials blamed for releasing an undocumented immigrant from custody in defiance of a federal arrest warrant.

Officials established a new “sanctuary cities enforcement working group” to identify state and local laws that the department could challenge in court. Bondi, on her first day as attorney general, ordered all Justice Department grant funding to sanctuary cities cut off — a directive that was blocked Thursday by a federal judge in San Francisco.

And as other judges have issued orders restraining everything from Trump’s unilateral attempt to end birthright citizenship to his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations of accused gang members, Bondi and her deputies have assailed them on social media and cable TV news.

But even against that backdrop, the decision to arrest and charge Dugan with felony crimes that could send her to prison for as long as six years marks an escalation.

 

 

People exit the Milwaukee County Courthouse on Friday. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
People exit the Milwaukee County Courthouse on Friday. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

 

 

Prosecutors charged Dugan with obstructing a proceeding before a federal agency and concealing an individual to prevent his arrest. According to the criminal complaint, the judge became “visibly upset” this month when she learned federal agents were waiting outside her courtroom to arrest Eduardo Flores Ruiz, 30, who was set to appear before her on misdemeanor state battery charges.

Dugan sent the agents down the hall to the office of the court’s chief judge, the complaint says. While they were away, she postponed Flores Ruiz’s hearing and escorted him and his lawyer through a jury exit that leads to a private area of the courthouse.

That area leads to the public hallway where federal agents were stationed, and the agents soon saw him in the hallway. One agent rode with Flores Ruiz in an elevator to the ground floor and, after meeting up with other agents outside, chased Flores Ruiz and arrested him, according to the complaint.

Dugan’s arrest has echoes of a case during Trump’s first term, when the Justice Department in 2018 charged a judge in Massachusetts with helping an undocumented immigrant escape from a courthouse. Those charges were dropped in 2022 under an agreement that required the judge to report herself to the state’s judicial discipline commission.

Rather than allow Dugan to surrender to authorities — an option routinely offered to defendants who are not deemed to be flight risks or a danger to arresting agents — federal authorities arrested her at her courthouse.

Craig Mastantuono, one of Dugan’s lawyers, contrasted that approach with Trump’s experience during each of his indictments, when he was allowed to surrender to authorities at an agreed-upon time. “It’s night versus day,” Mastantuono said. “It’s normal versus abnormal.”

On Friday evening, Patel posted a photo of Dugan, hands cuffed behind her back, being escorted from the building. “No one is above the law,” Patel wrote.

Aziz Huq, a constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, said it’s “wildly implausible” for the administration to say it’s equally applying the law after Trump granted clemency to people convicted of violent crimes — including assaulting police officers — during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Making Dugan’s arrest a spectacle, he said, appeared to be one of the administration’s goals.

“There is a kind of performative sheen or a performative element to the policy that is about not just the fact of quashing opposition wherever it might be found,” he said, “but also demonstrating the facts of that quashing through the overt and open humiliation … of the persons involved.”

 

Dugan is escorted by officials after her arrest. (X @FBIDirectorKash/Reuters)
Dugan is escorted by officials after her arrest. (X @FBIDirectorKash/Reuters)
 

Author: Patrick Marley and Jeremy Roebuck

Source: The Washington Post

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