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The FBI arrested a sitting judge in a Milwaukee County court in Wisconsin on Friday, claiming that she obstructed immigration enforcement agents from detaining an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan’s arrest is not only the latest escalation in Donald Trump’s fascist deportation program, it also marks the administration’s eagerness to take aim at any and all constraints on its power to act.
“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse,” wrote FBI director Kash Patel in a post on X. Patel added that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since.”
For the Trump administration, due process and an independent judiciary are hurdles to be kicked down.
Dugan faces charges of obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the U.S., as well as a charge of concealing an individual to prevent their discovery and arrest. According to reports, the judge escorted a man sought by ICE and his defense attorney through a non-public jury door.
In Wisconsin, there’s no explicit law dictating that judges must allow immigration enforcement into their courtrooms. Members of the judiciary nationwide have consistently stressed that the presence of ICE agents interferes with legal proceedings, as defendants fearing deportation miss court appearances for fear of ICE detention.
For the Trump administration, however, court appearances are beside the point: Due process and an independent judiciary are hurdles to be kicked down.
In the absence of any meaningful opposition party challenges, activists and organizers are struggling to gain ground in building robust resistance in the face of extraordinary repression. Unions, for their part, are disempowered. That has left courts as one of the few sites of actionable pushback on Trump’s agenda.
That we are left with only the courts is no good thing; the U.S. criminal legal system with its carceral designs has never been suitable terrain for achieving justice. And our current Supreme Court has been a regular aid to the far right and the president’s authoritarian ambitions.
Whatever limitations there are to Trump’s expansive power grabs, however, must be championed. Judges willing to push back on the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal behavior are a lifeline.
Just last week, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a new round of mass deportations of Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act. Judge James Boasberg has also recently found probable cause to hold the government in contempt for defying his orders to halt previous deportations to El Salvador’s prison camp under the act.
ICE on Friday also announced it will restore thousands of students’ previously terminated records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, after dozens of cases were brought by students led by the government to believe that their legal student immigration statuses had been revoked.
The SEVIS case is instructive. Again and again, judges sided with the students. One excoriated the government’s actions as “Kafkaesque.” Dozens of rulings have, at least temporarily, been a breakwater against Trump’s tidal wave of executive orders and his modus operandi of chaos, speed, and relentlessness.
Lawless in the Name of the Law
Questions of how flagrantly the administration will continue to disobey the courts abound — and there aren’t many reasons for optimism.
The targeting of judges for arrest is another clear signal that Trump will continue to attack the independent judiciary by force. The insult added to injury is that he will keep calling it the law.
“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her attorney told reporters on Friday.
She was an apt target for the Trump administration: Dugan, before her current stint on the bench, was the executive director of Catholic Charities in Milwaukee, a group that has done considerable work with poor and vulnerable people.
Dugan is not the first judge to be arrested for allegedly obstructing ICE. During Trump’s first term, federal prosecutors charged Judge Shelley Joseph in Massachusetts with obstruction of justice after she allegedly allowed a defendant to leave the building through a rear door and evade ICE. The federal charges were dropped, but the judge continues to face a judiciary disciplinary process.
There’s reason to fear that Dugan’s arrest will not stand alone in Trump’s second term, in all its authoritarian excess. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a message to other judges who might stand in the way of the administration’s deportation machine: “We are prosecuting you.”
Bondi had posted on X to confirm the judge’s arrest earlier in the day.
“No one is above the law,” she wrote.
For Bondi, like too many others in Trump world, the law appears to be Trump’s word alone.
