Shownotes Transcript
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Federal agents arrest a state judge in Wisconsin, accusing her of helping an illegal immigrant evade arrest at the courthouse in Milwaukee. What happened, and is this an overreach by the Trump administration or a justified response to a violation of the law? Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, editorial board member Colin Levy and columnist Kim Strassel.
On Friday morning, FBI agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a judge on the Milwaukee County Circuit Court since 2016, bringing quick alarms from the left about attacks on democracy and the judicial system. Here is White House spokesman Carolyn Leavitt during the press briefing yesterday explaining the administration's view.
Let's be clear about what this judge did. She obstructed federal law enforcement who were looking for an illegal alien in her courthouse. She showed that illegal alien the door to evade law enforcement officials. That is a clear-cut case of obstruction. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that. And so anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is—
putting ourselves at risk of being prosecuted. Absolutely. Colin, let's start with the facts. What does the Trump administration say that Judge Dugan did? And does it seem to fit the law that she's being charged under? Yeah, Kyle. I mean, I think so. I mean, I think this is really a pretty clear cut case. I mean, you know, as we just heard, there was evidence that Judge Dugan intentionally tried to shield the immigrant Eduardo Flores Ruiz from
from the ICE agents that were waiting in the hallway by ushering him out the back door instead of through the regular hallways.
hallway where the agents were waiting. According to the criminal complaint against her, that amounts to obstruction of an official proceeding, you know, and concealing an individual to prevent discovery and arrest. So I understand the instinct here that this is about Trump arresting judges. But when you look at the actual complaint against Judge Dugan, this is a pretty clear cut case of
of her trying to help this guy evade the ICE agents. So Mr. Flores Ruiz was at a pretrial conference, by the way, on three charges of battery for allegedly beating up two people, including, I think it was a roommate and also his own girlfriend. And his actions put both of them in the hospital. So to put a delicate point on it, we're not talking about a lovely guy here who was just trying to make his way in America, you know, working three jobs.
to send money back to his family. You're talking about a violent guy who was in court on battery charges, and this judge was trying to help him evade arrest as a purely political matter. I think that that's a tough one, and it certainly falls directly into the center of what the Trump administration wants.
The sign of the story that we have so far is based on an FBI agent's telling of the facts that has been filed in this federal court case.
Judge Dugan has not, as of this morning when I checked, filed anything in response yet. There was a statement issued on her behalf saying Judge Dugan will defend herself vigorously and looks forward to being exonerated, unquote. But Kim, my read of this FBI filing is that the facts, I think, are as Colin lays out, and it looks pretty bad for Judge Dugan. I mean, it goes into some detail about the agents who were there at the courthouse and
They were asked not to effectuate this arrest on this guy in the courtroom. They were asked to wait outside and do it in a public space of the courthouse, which, after all, is a public building. It goes through how Judge Dugan apparently was made aware that ICE was in the building. She went out.
And she apparently confronted the officers and argued back and forth with them, telling them that they would have to leave, telling them they'd have to go talk to the chief judge, telling them that their administrative warrant wasn't good enough and they'd have to come back maybe with a judicial warrant, which I find strange behavior, Kim. This is not her.
This is not even her realm of law. She is a state judge. And these are federal agents who are trying to effectuate an arrest of somebody at a courthouse. Also, by the way, the FBI agent says one of the reasons that they like doing that is they know where the person who is judged to be illegal is supposed to be. And they've already gone through courthouse security.
So there is not a risk of confronting somebody who may or may not be armed. This complaint really goes into detail about the hoops and agreements the ICE agents made at the request of local officials and judges there. They were trying to do everything to accommodate ICE.
the judge. And when they were asked to go down, and this is, I think, very important, they were at one point asked by her, she initially asked them to leave. And when they would not do so, she asked them to go see the chief judge. They managed to get him on the phone. And he said that they were in a process within the building of trying to figure out where the best place these arrests should happen. They asked and clarified, could they do it in the public hallway? And according to this criminal complaint, they were told yes.
So they'd even got a nod from the chief judge here only to then have Judge Dugan escort this guy out of a door that is normally reserved for juries to go out of instead.
Look, the other context of this, which I think is notable and does not help Judge Dugan, is that there's a little bit of a history here that was going on, at least for the past month. Democrats in the county had become kind of vocal about some of these arrests that were happening in courtrooms, and they were angry about it. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley had issued a statement at one point claiming that arrests like this were, quote, an act.
Yeah.
The thing to bear in mind, and we just need to put this in the broader context, is remember, we have a sort of power sharing agreement between the states and the feds when it comes to immigration law. And they are not required to assist the federal government. They're not required to wrap up defendants in a big pink bow and hand them over. But they are not allowed to obstruct when federal agents have all of their information, which they obtained on their own and are effectuating an arrest agreement.
And this looks very much as though that is exactly what happened here. And what are you going to do, too? You're just going to shrug and say, like, well, she obstructed us. I guess we'll just move on. I don't think you can just close your eyes and turn away from that. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.
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Welcome back. One final point on the facts, Colin, there's also suggestions in this FBI filing that the illegal immigrants case was then not even handled by Judge Dugan that day after she escorted him out. And there were victims in the courtroom that were ready to see what was going to happen in that case. That's another sort of strange aspect.
On the law, I think Kim is exactly right here that there is a balance and there are federalism concerns. You've seen them litigated in some of these lawsuits over sanctuary city policies. The Trump administration, for example, recently filed a lawsuit against the state of Illinois. And one of their complaints
is that they are not getting cooperation. But the state officials, local officials are under no obligation to take affirmative actions to help enforce federal law. There's no commandeering is the word in the Supreme Court's precedence on this. The federal government cannot commandeer state sovereign officials
and local officials. And so one of the points in that dispute is the federal government is complaining that the state of Illinois has people in custody and then releases them and does not tell the federal government what those release dates are going to be. And I guess we will find out in this litigation whether that is not cooperating, which is something that local and state officials can do, or whether that's obstructing. But this Judge Dugan situation looks to me like it is
over the line. She's being charged under two laws. One of them is this obstruction statute. Here's the other one. I would just read the language in the law because it is pretty clear. It says, whoever harbors or conceals any person for whose arrest a warrant or process has been issued under the provisions of any law of the United States so as to prevent his discovery and arrest,
after notice or knowledge of the fact that a warrant or process has been issued for the apprehension shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year. So Colin, to go through those elements, it's concealing a person to prevent the person's arrest and
after having notice and knowledge that there is a warrant outstanding, and at least according to the filing that the FBI has made, the allegations, the statement of facts from federal officials, the federal agents that were there at the courthouse, that seems to have been met by Judge Dugan. Yeah, there's no question, Kyle. And you got the line exactly right. State agents don't have to cooperate or
actively participate or be commandeered, but they cannot actively obstruct. And Judge Dugan's actions here really were across that line toward obstruction. I want to address one other thing too that's been discussed in the context of this case. You just mentioned that these agents showed up with a warrant and people have been saying, well, there's this question about whether or not the agents should have had a judicial warrant in order to arrest Judge Dugan instead of the administrative warrant that they actually had.
But I think we should be clear here that both instruments give a federal agent the authority to arrest an individual and take them into custody. And the difference is that the administrative warrant doesn't require probable cause and it's internally issued by ICE. So ICE agents can only arrest with an administrative warrant in a public space. And that's exactly what they were trying to do here.
Judicial warrants, on the other hand, you know, they require probable cause and they're issued by federal judges. So those are to arrest individuals for violations of criminal law, typically. So that's a much more serious warrant. But for ICE's purposes, there's no question that an administrative warrant was completely adequate.
for what the agents were doing here. The one other thing I wanted to mention on the question of the politics that Kim was mentioning, this instinct to turn this into a fight between the judiciary and the administration. Since this happened of Judge Dugan, there's been some rumblings within the Wisconsin judiciary that concern me. In particular, there was a story today about
Another Wisconsin judge, Judge Isham, I think her name is, who suggested that she might refuse to hold court in protest of Judge Dugan's arrest. She wrote an email to other Wisconsin judges saying something to the effect of, you know, I have no intention of allowing anyone to be taken out of my courtroom by ICE and sent to a concentration camp, I think she said.
So she said if judges weren't offered support, she wouldn't be holding court in her courtroom. And if she were arrested, then she would know she'd done the right thing. And I think that's a really unfortunate development in this case, especially to those of us who have enormous interest in the judiciary's ability to maintain its composure and its cool demeanor in the face of what really are unprecedented
political attacks from the Trump administration in other areas. I mean, certainly we've discussed before and Kim mentioned earlier, there are these other aspects of the way the administration is handling its arguments with the judiciary, you know, with the other federal courts that have been problematic, but it can't always just be about that.
But this kind of case that Judge Dugan is involved in, Kim, these kinds of charges are not unprecedented, is my understanding. It seems that there's a similar thing that happened in 2018. What was the story of that and how did those charges end up? What was the result? This is really important, not just for the facts of the case, which are very similar, but for where it has landed at this point. This was in 2018. There was a Massachusetts judge by the name of Shelly Joseph.
accused of very similar, almost identical circumstances. There was an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom. This particular person, like the individual we're talking about now, had already been deported before, but this one was up on narcotics charges in the Massachusetts case.
ICE showed up. This judge, with the assist of a court officer who also landed in hot water, helped the immigrant go down to a secure lockup area below the courthouse and ultimately go out through a door where the immigrant jumped a fence and evaded capture. All the while, this ICE person is sitting upstairs waiting for his moment and no one informed him or her.
She was charged with obstruction of justice by a U.S. attorney. Again, so this was in 2018 under the Trump administration. So this was another arrest that had happened in the Trump administration. In 2022, those charges were dropped under the Biden administration. However, with the agreement that this judge would submit herself to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct. And
And that commission late last year did file charges against her saying that her behavior had been unbecoming of a judicial officer. And it's pretty rare. I looked it up for the commission to do that. They've only done it a handful of times. And this now goes back into the judicial system, which will look into these allegations and make a final determination. But even the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct recognized that this was not appropriate behavior for a judge to
And I think this is something worth bearing in mind. We want to respect our judges, and most of them are very dedicated to law and order. But we can't think that they're completely infallible. Reuters did a pretty fascinating review a couple of years ago of 1,500 cases over 12 years in which judges had either resigned or retired or faced judicial public disciplinary charges after allegations of misconduct.
And it's not as totally rare as you might think. Some of these are personal foibles. One of my favorite stories as part of that report was a Maryland judge who was arrested for drunk driving and was in fact allowed to return to the bench, but only if he took a breathalyzer test before every proceeding. So, you know, I mean, the point being is judges are human too. We want them obviously to have strict adherence to law and order and set that example.
But it doesn't always happen in the real world. And sometimes charges are a requirement or a consequence of failing to stick to that law and order. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America. And Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is using Google AI to create smarter tolling systems and improve traffic flow for Texans. This is a new era of American innovation.
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Welcome back. Colin, what do you make of this as a political matter? Notable in the last few days, a couple of polls suggesting that President Trump's immigration policy is not approved of by a majority of Americans. There's one from Washington Post and ABC. It says 53 percent disapprove of President Trump on immigration, 46 percent approve.
Same numbers from the Associated Press, 53 disapprove and 46% approve. And Colin, I mean, I think that that's partially reflection of some of the haphazard way it seems that these deportations have been gone about erroneously, apparently deporting somebody to El Salvador.
then when the courts say that the trump administration has to facilitate his return the trump administration has kind of thrown up its hands and said we can't do anything about that news stories over the weekend about allegations of some children u.s citizens born in the united states who were deported with their mothers who were in the united states illegally we're still waiting for more information about
about those cases. I don't know exactly all of the details and we'll have to watch as these court filings and more information comes out about them. The claim by this group called the National Immigration Project, here's a quote, "They did not offer the mothers any alternatives to having their children deported with them." And the claim is that they had family caregivers who could have kept those US citizen children in the United States if they had been given the opportunity to do that.
And Colin, I think the difficulty for the Trump administration here is that I think some people probably heard this story about the judge being arrested on Friday and thought, you know, is the Trump administration escalating here? Is this an overreach? And you really have to dig into the facts and the law.
and the filings and the specifics to tease out which of these incidents might be something the public would not approve of and which might be broadly popular if the Trump administration can get across what it says happened. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the stories about these three children who were the U.S. citizens who were deported with their mothers, and those are to me problematic stories. From what I've read, these were situations where the children, you know, all of them were really young.
attended these immigration appointments with their mothers and then they just went with their mothers when the mothers were deported. You know, as you said, the Trump administration claims that the mothers chose to take the children with them, which is understandable and likely if that's true. But the fact that this was done in such short order and without any apparent due process to consider the rights of those children who do hold American citizenship is something to consider and something to take seriously.
The story that one of the children who was sent back to Honduras has a kind of cancer and may have trouble getting access to the kind of medical care they were receiving in the U.S., that's just a painful and heartbreaking story, especially remembering here that the child is a U.S. citizen. I think, broadly speaking, the problem is that the administration thinks it makes a
good politics to target federal activist judges, you know, and to target illegal immigrants, and that the base gets amped up over that whenever the administration picks a fight with one of these judges. And that instinct, in turn, you know, the sort of counterweight is has caused the left to assume that therefore all Trump administration actions against federal judges are equally baseless and half-baked and politicized.
You know, that's not the case, as we've said in Wisconsin. That's just not what happened when you actually dig into what happened in this criminal complaint. So you can believe that the administration is going too far with its immigration enforcement and still also acknowledge the fact that Judge Dugan is an officer of the court. And there's no excuse for her deliberately obstructing the federal government's attempt to take custody of an illegal immigrant.
You know, she was breaking the law. It's not that complicated. Kim, we'll give you the last word. I mean, I do agree that the president is on favorable terrain here with the underlying facts of this case in the Judge Dugan arrest. One other thing I would add is that the illegal immigrant in question here had already been previously deported from the United States.
and apparently came back without getting any sort of legal entry. But Kim, the White House wants to focus on all of the bad guys that it is deporting. And I think that that's probably true. There are many of them. And I think the public would probably broadly support them.
that. I think where public opinion probably is in the main is more MS-13 members and fewer kids and pregnant moms. And the difficulty is the Trump administration has to hit that balance if it wants its immigration policies to remain broadly popular. And by the way, I think that the public is probably supportive of the fact that the migrant flows at the border have fallen from the surges under President Biden to the trickle
right now. But it's odd to me that President Trump isn't talking more about that and declaring a deterrence victory. He seems to want to just crack down even more hard. I think you're seeing a change in that. It's been very noticeable this week in the wake of these headlines over this judge and some of these stories that you just mentioned, Kyle, that the administration is
wants to seem to get back on top of this narrative about who exactly it is going after and deporting. And so you had, for instance, the appearance over the weekend of 100 yard signs in front of the White House, each featuring the mugshot of an alleged criminal who'd been arrested with big bold letters underneath of what they had been arrested for. And I mean, rape,
murder, sexual actions against a child. It was pretty icky stuff. And
You've also had administration officials out on a blitz. Tom Holman, the border czar, has been on every TV program you can turn on, delving into some of those cases and reinforcing that view. Marco Rubio, even too, I mean, it's notable that this administration is not backing down on some of these cases and trying to make an argument. Marco Rubio, I did think, made a decent point just on the politics. He was asked about this case of these three children and noted that
Had they not been sent with their mother, every headline would instead have been about how the Trump administration was engaging in family separation and pointed out that if they have U.S. passports, they're of course entitled to come back immediately to the United States, assuming that there is a family member here to receive them.
So you can still have your views on the mothers and should they have been deported, etc. But again, I'm making the political point that they feel as though they are on high political ground when it comes to the main targets of a lot of these deportation orders. And we'll watch the polls and see how that turns out. But it doesn't take much sometimes for public mood to shift.
Thank you, Kim and Colin. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America. And Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small.
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