Well, that didn’t take long.
According to The New York Times, Judge Hannah Dugan of Milwaukee County Circuit Court — now famous because she’s become a member in good standing of whatever remains of #TheResistance — was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday for allegedly helping illegal immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz evade arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Dugan, who was temporarily removed from her position by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, has indicated a willingness to fight the charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings. She’ll make her first appearance in court on Thursday.
Since Flores-Ruiz had illegally entered the United States twice and was thus a felon, obstructing and concealing him constitutes a felony. Politico reported the maximum sentence for both offenses would be six years.
Despite the fact that the case seems like a cut-and-dried example of actively preventing federal agents from doing their job in an extrajudicial manner, the Times — being the Times, of course — noted that “many Democrats, lawyers and former judges have denounced it as an assault on the judiciary.”
If so, it’s certainly an interesting legal hill to die on.
In April, Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national, was in Dugan’s courtroom for a pre-trial conference on three counts of misdemeanor battery with modifiers for domestic violence. Attorney General Pam Bondi noted that the man had allegedly beaten a man and a woman so badly both needed to be taken to the hospital.
Not only that, according to a Department of Homeland Security media release, Flores-Ruiz has illegally entered the country twice.
“This criminal illegal alien has a laundry list of violent criminal charges including strangulation and suffocation, battery, and domestic abuse,” the release said.
Should Dugan serve jail time if convicted of the felony charge?
When Dugan found out that ICE officials were waiting to take Flores-Ruiz into custody, however, she allegedly decided to confront them herself — and allegedly tried to shield Flores-Ruiz from being taken into lawful detention.
“The judge screams at the immigration officers. She’s furious. Visibly shaken. Upset. Sends them off to talk to the chief judge,” Bondi said during a media appearance.
“She comes back in the courtroom — you’re not going to believe this — takes the defendant and the defense attorney back in her chambers. Takes them out a private exit and tells them to leave, while a state prosecutor and victims of domestic violence are sitting in the courtroom.”
“Despite having been advised of the administrative warrant for the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Judge Dugan then escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel out of the courtroom through the ‘jury door,’ which leads to a nonpublic area of the courthouse,” the FBI’s complaint read.
ICE agents eventually caught Flores-Ruiz outside the courthouse as he tried to flee on foot.
Bondi said that the DOJ initially expressed disbelief at this level of intransigence from someone sworn to uphold the law — “We could not believe that a judge really did that,” she said — but, after an investigation, decided Dugan should be charged.
The grand jury agreed, even though outlets like the Times wrung their hands and clutched their pearls — and wrung their pearls and clutched their hands, just for good measure — over the fact that “the arrest of the judge marked an escalation of the Trump administration’s warnings that local officials must not impede federal efforts to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.”
Bondi, in a video released regarding the Dugan charges, may have put it best: “It doesn’t matter what line of work you are in, if you break the law, we will follow the facts and we will prosecute you,” she said.
Being a judge does not allow you to aid and abet lawbreakers just because your personal political beliefs are such that you believe they deserve to stay in the country indefinitely, illegally, because those laws really aren’t laws since you don’t like them.
Flores-Ruiz is far from a model citizen — and even then, we have a judge willing to not only throw a Karen-fit at ICE agents carrying out a lawful order against a charged domestic abuser with a history of violence, but then to help him to escape. This kind of behavior is below William Kunstler / Jacques Vergès cultural ambulance-chaser lawyers, much less judges.
And yet, Dugan continued to paint her actions as upholding legal principles.
“Judge Hannah C. Dugan has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge,” her lawyers said in a statement after her arrest.
“Judge Dugan asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court.”
Well, we’re all innocent until proven guilty — but I hope she has a much better story for the jury than the one most accounts have provided us with thus far. If not, thanks to her little stunt, she’s facing years in prison.
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