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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

> He accused Dugan of “intentionally misdirecting” federal agents who arrived at the courthouse to detain an immigrant who was set to appear before her in an unrelated proceeding.

It sounds like the arrest isn't because of any official act of the judge, but rather over them either not telling the ICE agents where the person was or giving them the wrong information about their location.

There are some pretty broad laws about "you can't lie to the feds", but I think the unusual thing here is that they're using them against a reasonably politically-connected person who's not their main target. (They're normally akin to the "we got Al Capone for tax evasion" situation -- someone they were going after, where they couldn't prove the main crime, but they could prove that they lied about other details.)

EDIT: since I wrote that 15 minutes ago, the article has been updated with more details about what the judge did:

> ICE agents arrived in the judge’s courtroom last Friday during a pre-trial hearing for Eduardo Flores Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican national who is facing misdemeanor battery charges in Wisconsin.

> Dugan asked the agents to leave and speak to the circuit court’s chief judge, the Journal Sentinel reported. By the time they returned, Flores Ruiz had left.

I.e. the ICE agents showed up in the middle of a court proceeding, and the judge said they'd need to get permission from the chief judge before they could interrupt proceedings. The judge then didn't stop the defendant from leaving once the proceeding was done.

EDIT 2: the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article says:

> Sources say Dugan didn't hide the defendant and his attorney in a jury deliberation room, as other media have said. Rather, sources said, when ICE officials left to talk with the chief judge on the same floor, Dugan took the pair to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor.

Which is an escalation above the former "didn't stop them", admittedly, but I'm not sure how it gets to "misdirection".

View on HN

1. It isnt clear ICE agents have any legal authority to demand a judge tell them anything. 2. It is highly likely this is an official act, since it would be taken on behalf of court, so the immigrant can give, eg. testimony in a case.

A "private act" here would be the judge lying in order to prevent their deportation because they as a private person wanted to do so. It seems highly unlikely that this is the case.

I updated my post with new information from the updated article, and in the context of that I think you're pretty much right. It sounds like the judge basically said "you need permission to arrest someone in the middle of my hearing, go get it" and then didn't change anything about the process of their hearing while that permission was being obtained.

This was definitely not them being helpful, but I'm incredibly doubtful that they could be successfully prosecuted for this.

[flagged]

For people who don't live in crazy town, this would be considered an oppressive action, arresting a judge for following procedure simply because it inconvenienced you.

The judge wasn’t arrested for following procedure. Read the complaint.

Considering the ongoing due process deprivations this is the most concerning aspect to me. This is a sitting judge which is a significant escalation against the judiciary.

I was talking to someone earlier about how we in America, today, are not entitled to anything. Just in the last hundred years, people lived under secret police, dictators, state-controlled media, occupation, you name it. Hundreds of millions of people lived their whole life under the KGB or Stasi. Hundreds of millions live in autocracy even today. Some straight up live in a warzone as we speak. The idea that "we" can't be going through this is beyond entitled. Nothing is guaranteed to us. We are being shown how fragile this all is by the universe.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

I expect America to be a beacon of light and I will fight for it. We all need to fight for it, especially the people who frequent this message board because we are among the most privileged and capable. It’s disappointing to me how many of our tech leaders forget what made them great in the first place and abuse us all in the pursuit of personal wealth.

If it turns autocratic then there's no discussion to be had. Judge will waterboarded in Gitmo and Trump is de-facto king. We are no longer a nation of laws, the USA is renamed to Trumpopolis and we all have to get government mandated orange spray tans.

So assuming that doesn't happen, this is an action by a non-autocratic executive meant to have a chilling effect on low level judges who don't want to spend a few days in lockup just because. A knob that the executive is (mostly) allowed to turn but that is considered in poor taste if you wish to remain on good terms with the judiciary. The bar for arrest is really low and the courts decide if she committed a crime which she obviously didn't.

You seem to be quite blasé about the possibility of autocracy. But yes, there is a risk that Trump becomes a dictator and we're no longer a nation of laws. It depends on how people like us react to consolidations of power like this, or the illegal impoundment, or cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia's. The law only matters insofar as we and our representatives can enforce it.

I'm not so much blasé about it, more just nihilistic because I am the last person with any kind of power to stop it. I imagine most of HN falls into this bucket of people with no real political power or influence. My realistic option if it happens is to move.

I'm also making plans contingency plans to move, but I may not be able to. Individually, no, we don't have power, but if everyone actually protested, we would - the Ukrainian revolution[1] started out as just mass protests (Euromaidan), for instance. The problem is that not enough of us are doing it, maybe because too many people are apathetic, uninformed, or don't take the possibility of autocracy seriously.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

Protest! People power is the best way to resist autocracy especially in the early stages when resistance has a chance of success. Don’t ignore the fact that protests are happening. Musk is fleeing Washington because the backlash successfully tanked Tesla. That’s a big win right there!

Consider just how much more inconvenient/shitty/tragic it will be for you and the people you know if you are indeed forced to move, as compared to successfully pushing back right now.

Autocracy comes in shades. Arresting judges who do things you don't like is yet another shade darker than we've seen so far... And things were already pretty dark.

I'm not saying it's good, for sure. But I don't think it's a sign that the push for autocratic authoritarianism is winning, either.

My optimistic take is that this is the sort of stupid overreach that works to turn other arms of government against the executive. The judiciary tends to be prickly about its prerogatives, and Trump's far from the point where he can just push stuff through without some cover.

> My optimistic take is that this is the sort of stupid overreach that works to turn other arms of government against the executive

This is your take given the blatant corruption and clear constitutional violations of this administration? Sure, let's hope that norms and vibes save us against an executive ignoring due process. Those other branches don't even have a way to enforce anything; the executive are the ones who arrest people.

The power of the executive is constrained, ultimately, by what people let them do. Including people inside the executive branch -- the people who're doing the arresting, transporting the prisoners, gunning down the protesters, etc. There's a lot of people involved who aren't committed to some authoritarian project, they're just... doing their job. They can be swayed by vibes, and general unpopularity of the regime.

The alternative to this view is either giving up or preparing for armed struggle. It's certainly possible that we could get there, but I don't think it's guaranteed yet.

(I acknowledge that this position is quite the blend of optimism and cynicism.)

Like this judge they're being ousted for the smallest pushback and are being replaced by project 2025 people, they even set up a system that you can apply to do exactly this. Trump (or Vance that is fully in with Thiel) will have full control over all agencies where all low level employees are on board with this Christo fascist takeover and the judiciary will be powerless.

Dear god wake up before it’s too late.

We are far past the point of any optimistic take like that being realistic.

The fact that HN is letting political posts stay on the front page after months of suppression shows that we are past the point of denying the authoritarian road we are on.

We've been heading this direction with hardly a pause, let alone step back, since the '70s.

Authoritarianism was winning for 50+ years. Nobody with power meaningfully tried to stop it, and voters didn't give enough of a shit to elect people who would. Where we're at now, is that it won.

Trump is calling for the Fed's Jerome Powell to be fired for not lying and saying everything will be fine as a result of tariffs. He pulled the security clearance of former CISA Director Chris Krebs, and anyone associated with him, for not lying about the result of his cyber security investigation of the 2020 election. He also pulled security clearances for political rivals including Biden, Harris, and Cheney as well as the Attorneys General involved in his civil case for fraud, which he lost and was ordered to pay $355 million.

This is blatant and unambiguous. "If you cross me, I will use executive power to destroy you". There is no optimistic view of this.

> incredibly doubtful that they could be successfully prosecuted

Strongly agree. But, as I’m sure we both know, some other less-politically-connected people will be a bit more afraid of getting arrested on ridiculous grounds because of this. So, mission accomplished.

> incredibly doubtful that they could be successfully prosecuted for this.

But they can be successfully arrested. You can beat the rap but not the ride, etc.

The US is not yet at the level of dysfunction where jurisdiction is settled with gunfire, but ICE seem to be determined to move that closer.

"You can beat the rap but not the ride" is phrased like the judge actually did anything wrong. That seems very doubtful. This administration has shown they are not entitled to the presumption that they are acting in good faith.

I don't think it implies the judge did anything wrong. If you're arrested, you're going to experience whatever the cops want to do to you, regardless of whether they can convict you of it.

"You can beat the rap but not the ride" is an indictment of the cops, not the arrestee.

I don’t know. It seems pretty unusual.

Imagine that someone is being charged with shoplifting and literally at trial. Some other law enforcement agency shows up to the trial and wants to arrest them for jaywalking.

It seems dysfunctional that the court would release them when they know a different law enforcement agency is literally in the building and wanting to arrest them.

Is this how it works when the FBI comes to a county court looking for someone the county cops have in custody?

Talk to the cops, not the judge who is in a proceeding? Go talk to the chief justice?

The idea that the judge did anything wrong here, based on the description given by the FBI themselves, is absolutely beyond the pale. There's zero reason for ICE agents to barge into court and demand to take somebody.

They didn't even leave one of the multiple agents in the courtroom to wait for the proceedings to end. To blame the judge at all in this requires making multiple logical and factual jumps that even the FBI did not put forward.

Edit: the Trump administration has also been attacking the Catholic Charities of Milwaukee, which this judge used to run:

> Before she was a judge, Dugan worked as a poverty attorney and executive director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

It seems pretty clear that this is a highly politically motivated arrest that has zero justification.

This reminds me of those cops arresting that nurse, over their attempts to illegally have blood drawn from an unconscious person.

LEO should have no say whatsoever regarding any medical proceedure.

any one who keeps a hippocratic oath should not be performing procedures because they were "commanded" to, under pain of professional discreditation.

Oh, I’m certainly not endorsing the arrest of the judge.

But wouldn’t the bailiff hold the person?

Is it typical for the FBI to lose a suspect in this manner? If so, this seems dysfunctional as if someone is in the court system then jurisdictions need to coordinate to just operate efficiently. It needs fixing so if ICE wants someone and a local courthouse has them in custody that ICE can pick them up.

But arresting judging is not going to help fix this bureaucratic silliness.

On what grounds would the bailiff hold the person?

I'm not sure why the courthouse should hold someone for ICE, it wasn't even necessary here they still got the person. All they had to do was stay where they were.

That theres a federal warrant for his detention.

I don't think this would be to hold them indefinitely. Just that they would have the suspect sit there and wait for the agents to return.

What federal warrant was there? I don't see any mention of one but the best that ICE could issue is not a judicial warrant and does not meet most of the requirements under the 4th amendment for detainment of a person.

Generally state and local law enforcement and courts have no legal requirement to enforce most federal arrest warrants. This is due to our dual sovereignty system. Of course they also can't actively interfere with federal law enforcement or lie to federal officers, but it doesn't seem like that's what happened in this incident.

No one is obligated to do ICE’s dirty work for them. Even most totalitarian countries don’t go that far.

> local courthouse has them in custody

I think this is the disconnect you're seeing. He was not in custody: he was appearing before a judge.

Oh, thanks. I assumed he was appearing before the judge as a defendant and was in custody.

"You can't beat the ride" is saying that cops can punish you regardless of whether what you did was illegal.

That's certainly one interpretation of it, and a pretty reasonable one. However, I typically interpret it as "if the police think you've committed a crime, you are going to jail and almost nothing is going to stop that." In that incredibly famous "Don't Talk to the Police" talk[0], the attorney asks the former-cop-turned-law-student if he's every been convinced not to arrest someone based on what the suspect said. Not a single time in his entire law enforcement career.

This is also sort of the crux of the talk - if nothing you can say will convince the police not to arrest you, and things you do say can make things worse, your best bet is to just shut up and talk to an attorney if it gets to that point.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

I think we're all agreeing here. "You can't beat the ride" means that if the cops want to arrest you, lock you up, etc., you can't do anything about it. Doesn't matter if you're guilty, innocent, or just a random bystander, you're not going to stop them from taking you and doing whatever they want in the process.

Looking at the rest of the GP's comment:

> The US is not yet at the level of dysfunction where jurisdiction is settled with gunfire, but ICE seem to be determined to move that closer.

I don't think they intended to imply that the judge did anything wrong. Rather, they're saying that if you live in a world where the FBI or ICE or other official agencies can rough you up regardless of whether you're guilty or innocent in the eyes of the law, disputes are going to get settled with violence. After all, if the police are just going to make life difficult for you when you're arrested (the "ride") regardless of whether you're guilty in the eyes of the law (the "rap"), what's the logical response when you see a policeman coming to you? You shoot them. Don't let them arrest you because you're gonna have a bad time anyway.

Various marginalized communities (in both other countries and parts of the U.S.) already function that way - violence is an endemic part of how problems are solved. And going back to the threadstarter, that's why police departments have instituted sanctuary city policies. They don't want to get shot, and so they try to create an incentive structure where generally law-abiding (except for their immigration status) residents are unafraid to go to the police and help them catch actual criminals, rather than treating all police as the enemy.

ICE should’ve been reformed after Trump 1, but at this point we’re going to need to unwind the whole organization when we get that man out of power. They’ve shown themselves to be pretty disinterested in laws, democracy, etc.

This is the reform of ICE. Trump was elected explicitly promising to do much more arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants, which is instantiated by having agents of the federal government do things like arrest and deport illegal immigrants on trial for unrelated crimes and actually charge citizens like this judge who interfere with this process with crimes, in order to induce them to not interfere with the arrest and deportation of illegal immigrants.

The fact the FBI participated in this arrest is chilling. ICE being a proto secret police seems to be perceived already. The FBI now? There’s question whether the ICE agents even had legal grounds to demand arrest regardless, whether they had a warrant, etc - and the facts established are pretty clearly not prosecutable. So this is pure intimidation, going after the judicial in what will likely be a flagrantly abusive way, yet doing it proudly and across the media - this is a shot across the bow telling judges at all levels they are next. And if there’s anyone that knows being arrested changes your life forever, it’s judges.

I am not alarmist or hyperbolic by nature, and I don’t say this lightly, but this is the next level and the escalation event that leads to the end game. The separation of powers is unraveling, and this is America’s Sulla moment where the republic cracks. The question remains did the anti federalists bake enough stability into the constitution to ensure our first Sulla doesn’t lead to Julius Caesar.

The accused is accused of violating federal law, so it's normal that a federal agency would make the arrest. FBI seems to make more sense than DEA or ATF, no?

It’s not that the agency is wrong; it’s that the agency would do it. This is the agency that since J Edgar Hoover has very carefully rebuilt its reputation and is very guarded in it. This act is entirely reminiscent of the political corruption of the FBI of old. That regression, that fast, is frightening.

ICE being shady is by many people accepted, the DEA, ATF even. But the FBI has built itself a pretty strong reputation of integrity and professionalism, and resistance to political pressure and corruption. In some ways I at least viewed it as a firewall in law enforcement against this sort of stuff.

Now who watches the watchers?

ICE, ATF, and CBP has always been the house for the dregs of federal LEO. It is for the people that fail to get into anything else.

FBI is prestigious because they get the most qualified tyrants, who are smart enough to lie and deceive in ways that are airtight enough that those at ICE take the heat. The surprising thing here isn't the fact that they did it, but that they didn't do the normal way of digging or manufacturing something else to pin on the judge.

Anecdotally, I have heard that the most trustworthy (perhaps only trustworthy) Federal law enforcement group is the US Marshalls.

US Marshalls IIRC is also the hardest to get into. If I recall they have like one day a year they accept applications and they all (only certain # accepted) get filled within seconds. (I'm probably embellishing but not by much).

For most of its life the FBI has been a hand of the federal government to quell dissent, this new perspective on the FBI being professional and non-partisan is pretty new.

Yes it is - and it was carefully cultured over decades. A reputation takes years to build and seconds to destroy. Mission accomplished.

This might be the largest problem with the US government, most of what we used to take for granted isn't really enshrined in law anywhere, it was mostly a gentlemen's agreement that "you just don't do that, it's ungentlemanly" and not really law or anything enforceable.

The fact you can just fire the whole federal government (yes, i understand the probation thing) and there's *nothing* that blocks it is just completely bonkers to me. All you really needed was a bad actor that had no respect for the norms, because there's no real consequence to breaking them.

>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

You can't just arrest someone for nothing. You need probable cause. The question is whether a judge going about their day, doing nothing illegal, is probable cause. It's very likely not.

This is certainly not the first autocratic act of the FBI under Patel. They have been thoroughly compromised and lost integrity even before this arrest.

> ICE being a proto secret police

people think the Musk administration is dumb and incompetent, but this is incredibly clever. ICE is the prefect cover for a new unaccountable secret police.

anybody can be disappeared under the excuse of illegal immigration. if there's no due process, they can come for you and you have no recourse.

plenty of MAGAs are so ready to shout "but they're criminals" - and they still don't understand that it could be them next.

> The fact the FBI participated in this arrest is chilling

Even more frightening is that there was a federal judge that was willing to sign off on an arrest warrant for a fellow jurist, based on what is clearly political showmanship (they didn't need to arrest her at all to prosecute this crime!).

There were a lot of Rubicons crossed today. This ends with opposition politicians in jail. Every time. And usually to some level of armed revolt around/preventing transfers of power.

With AII.S2.C1.3.1 power jails are porous.

There's one effective sentence, if gained, which avoids this. I'm ordinarily #NotAFan, and that's another Rubicon once crossed presents massive peril, but in cases of flagrant constitutional violation I'm increasingly open to arguments in favour.

If that sentence cannot be attained, options are even more parlous.

Can you explain how this action reasonably leads to gunfire?

GP wasn't saying that one leads to another in a causal sense - simply that there are levels of dysfunction and this step is closer to the dysfunction of gunfire than the previous level.

Exactly. One of these days somebody is going to use a gun to defend someone from these masked/unmarked/unwarranted kidnappings.

The first time someone uses an impossible to trace drone to take out a law enforcement officer in the US is going to change everything.

The status quo has been that law enforcement can operate in an openly corrupt way with impunity because they can absolutely positively find someone who fights back.

But all the pieces are there for people to fight back with equal impunity. The technology is mature and deployed and has been tested in Ukraine and Syria for several years now.

It's just a matter of time before someone takes out a corrupt cop or ICE official and they get away away with it.

It will have a chilling effect on this kind of behaviour.

Oi, bruv. Those are inside thoughts.

After Hinckley and especially after 9/11 I didn't think it would be possible for someone to successfully assassinate a US president with a firearm. I was shocked at how trivial it was for two people to almost pull that off last year with Trump. It was pure luck that it didn't happen, and I'm skeptical that the Secret Service has fundamentally changed how they protect people in a way that will permanently prevent even something as mundane as assassination by firearm let alone drones.

If they can't stop someone from killing the president with a gun how could they possible stop someone from using a swarm of these to do the same?[0]

And how can law enforcement protect themselves from something like this? Like honestly, what is a counter to this kind of attack that scales up to provide protection for the hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers in America?

The only thing I can see scale to that level is reform of behaviour. If people respond to abuse of authority with these kinds of tools then the only viable method of prevention is to stop abusing authority.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEwD7wppkJw

> The only thing I can see scale to that level is reform of behaviour. If people respond to abuse of authority with these kinds of tools then the only viable method of prevention is to stop abusing authority.

I think that presumes that only "good" people will use drones (etc) that way.

You've got a bunch of people who you see as* "openly corrupt … with impunity", and a new tech that lets people attack with impunity. The result is that the same cops you're paying attention to* just change from wearing a badge to controlling a joystick.

* I'm phrasing it like this because while I know what 1312 means, I don't buy the "all" part.

It's not so much that I see subjectively see them as openly corrupt and operating with impunity, it's that there are objectively corrupt officials operating openly with impunity[0]. Every institution has corruption -- it's just a matter of degree.

I'm not suggesting that only 'good' people will use drones that way, far from it. What I'm suggesting is that a moderating force that hasn't existed for a long while due to asymmetry in police ability vs. the ability to resist them will return. The return of this moderating force will eliminate those few 'bad apples' eliminating their ability to abuse their authority, create fear in other law enforcement officers who would do those kinds of things or at least tolerate them, and would see some sort of law enforcement effort to crack down on corruption.

I'm sure you're right that corrupt police will find new and exciting ways to terrorize innocent people with technology as corrupt police will always continue to be corrupt but there will just be less of them because they'll be struck down by vigilantes and there will be more official efforts made to clamp down on them out of necessity.

You can probably model this like population dynamics with predator and prey populations in the wild.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

> It will have a chilling effect on this kind of behaviour

No, it will have an escalation effect. That's the problem. Starting with a massive crackdown on law abiding drone users.

Plus they obviously want to set an example: if you get in our way, bad things will happen to you.

Successful prosecution isn't needed, the harassment and incurring high legal fees will discourage a dozen other judges who might be less than boot-licklingly helpful to the autocrat.

I'm sure there will be plenty of attorneys willing to take on these cases pro bono.

That's the reality less equal animals have had to live under since basically forever.

I have a hard time seeing it as a bad thing that state and local authorities would have to view the feds the way we have to view all three because it brings our incentives more in alignment.

> It sounds like the judge basically said "you need permission to arrest someone in the middle of my hearing, go get it" and then didn't change anything about the process of their hearing while that permission was being obtained.

This is untrue if the FBI affidavit is believed. The judge adjourned the case without speaking to the prosecuting attorney, which is a change to the process of the hearing regarding three counts of Battery-Domestic Abuse-Infliction of Physical Pain or Injury.

  Later that morning, Attorney B realized that FloresRuiz’s case had never 
  been called and asked the court about it. Attorney B learned that 
  FloresRuiz’s case had been adjourned. This happened without Attorney B’s 
  knowledge or participation, even though Attorney B was present in court to 
  handle Flores-Ruiz’s case on behalf of the state, and even though victims 
  were present in the courtroom.

  A Victim Witness Specialist (VWS) employed by the Milwaukee County District 
  Attorney’s Office was present in Courtroom 615 on April 18, 2025. The VWS 
  made contact with the victims in Flores-Ruiz’s criminal case, who were also 
  in court. The VWS was able to identify Flores-Ruiz based upon the victims’ 
  reactions to his presence in court. The VWS observed Judge DUGAN gesture 
  towards Flores-Ruiz and an unknown Hispanic woman. [...] The VWS stated that 
  Judge DUGAN then exited through the jury door with Flores-Ruiz and the 
  Hispanic woman. The VWS was concerned because Flores-Ruiz’s case had not yet 
  been called, and the victims were waiting.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...

That is not what is alleged in the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...

The allegation is that the judge got upset that ICE was waiting outside the courtroom, sent the law enforcement officers to the chief judge's office, and then adjourned the hearing without notifying the prosecutor and snuck the man with a warrant out through a non-public door not normally used by defendants.

If those facts are accurate, it sure sounds like obstruction. Judges have to obey the law just like everyone else.

You are basically saying that everybody has to help ICE for free and on occasion do the job of ICE for free. That’s very totalitarian.

At the same time, it is settled law that a police officer cannot be held liable for not protecting citizens or not arresting someone. So you have more obligations than a police officer yet getting none of the pay or legal protections

Imagine you were a private tutor, in a private school on private land. ICE barges into the class trying to arrest one of the kids, but their paperwork is not in order so they promised to come back in 20 minutes

Do you imagine it will be possible to continue with the lesson as normal after such an event?

It is your discretion, when to start or stop a lesson, you work for yourself.

Do you imagine you should be obligated as a teacher to continue the lesson as if nothing has happened?

And if children want to leave to hold them by force?

why is it your problem That ICE isn’t competent and can’t get their shit right the first time?

ICE had a warrant. They were being courteous to the court by waiting until after the hearing instead of scooping the guy up on his way in.

And no, you don't have to help ICE, you just can't obstruct them. Sneaking a suspect out a back door while you stall the police is textbook, classic obstruction.

You're downvoted because ICE did not have a warrant.

ICE prints pieces of paper which they call "administrative warrants." Those were never reviewed by a judge and are internal ICE documents. An administrative warrant is not an actual warrant in any meaningful sense. It's a meaningful document (contrary to what you might read; it's not something one can just print on a laser printer and called it a day), but the "administrative" changes the meaning dramatically.

It seems like there were plenty of errors all around, in this situation, both on the judge's side and on ICE's side. However, I can't imagine any of those rose to the level of criminal behavior.

Sneaking a suspect out a back door while you stall the police is textbook, classic obstruction, but that changes quite a bit when it's a government employee operating within their scope of duty. Even if they make a mistake.

Schools don't want students scared to be there. Courtrooms want to count on cases not being settled by default because people are scared to show up. There is a valid, lawful reason for not permitting ICE to disrupt their government functions. That's doubly true when you can't count on ICE following the law and might ship someone off to El Salvador.

Asking an LLM, whether or not the judge broke laws is ambiguous. It is unambiguous that they showed poor judgment, and there should probably be consequences. However, what's not ambiguous is that the consequences should be through judicial oversight mechanisms, and not the FBI arresting the judge.

As a footnote, a judge not being able to rely on ICE following lawful orders significantly strengthens the government interest argument.

According to the FBI complaint that was just made available:

Judge Dugan escorted the subject through a "jurors door" to private hallways and exits instead of having the defendant leave via the main doors into the public hallway, where she visually confirmed the agents were waiting for him.

I couldn't tell if the judge knew for certain that ICE was only permitted to detain the defendant in 'public spaces' or not.

Regardless, the judge took specific and highly unusual action to ensure the defendant didn't go out the normal exit into ICE hands -- and that's the basis for the arrest.

I don't necessarily agree with ICE actions, but I also can't refute that the judge took action to attempt to protect the individual. On one side you kind of want immigrants to show up to court when charged with crimes so they can defend themselves... but on the other side, this individual deported in 2013 and returned to the country without permission (as opposed to the permission expiring, or being revoked, so there was no potential 'visa/asylum/permission due process' questions)

If this is all true, it still requires the judge be under some legal order to facilitate the deportation -- unless they have a warrant of the relevant type, the judge is under no such obligation. With a standard (administrative) warrant, ICE have no authority to demand the arrest.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1071

That's a general applicable law that prevents anyone - judge or not - from interfering with an apprehension.

That applies to warrants for arrest. The standard warrant ICE operate with is a civil warrant, and does not confer any actual authority to arrest an individual.

I keep hearing over and over the ICE warrants aren't real.

If they are arresting people using them and judges are recognizing them, they are real and the people demanding an arrest warrant are the sovereign citizen-tier people screaming at the sky wishing there was a different reality.

There are multiple types of warrants. All types are "real", but they convey different authority and different requirements upon both the arrestee and the arresters.

It is both rational and legal to insist that law enforcement stay within the bounds of the authority the specific type warrant they obtained. ICE civil warrants grant different authority than every-day federal arrest warrants. That ICE is abusing that authority is no reason to capitulate to it.

There are two different warrants. Ones issued by judges, which are "real" and ones signed by ICE supervisors which are little more than legal authorisation that this agent can go out and investigate a person -- even if they nevertheless attempt to arrest them.

ICE administrative warrants are essentially "I can do what I want" written in crayon.

Their only real purpose is fooling the gullible into confusing them for real warrants.

That's irrelevant.

Interfering with an ICE apprehension is illegal. That's what this judge did, which is why the FBI arrested her.

The violation is not that the judge _did not assist_, but that the judge took additional actions to ensure the defendant could access restricted areas they otherwise would have no right to be in so that they could get out of the building unseen.

The judge was aware of the warrant and ensured the defendant remained in private areas so they could get out of the building.

The FBI's argument is that her actions were unusual (a defendant being allowed into juror's corridors is highly unusual) and were only being taken explicitly to assist in evading ICE.

As we've heard from many lawyers recently regarding ICE... You are not required to participate and assist. However, you can't take additional actions to directly interfere. Even loudly shouting "WHY IS ICE HERE?" is dangerous (you probably should shout a more generic police concern, like 'hey, police, is there a criminal nearby? should i hide?'

Given that, it'll be interested to see how guidance on courthouse security on whether to let ICE in with administrative warrants is updated.

I'm amazed the immigrant actually even attended the court hearing in a climate like this. The person went to the court hearing in good faith. Anyway, probably less people will be going to court hearings now.

---

Wisconsin is also a major money pit for Elon, for whatever reason it's a battleground for everything that's going on this country:

Musk and his affiliated groups sunk $21 million into flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court:

https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-elon-musk...

Musk gives away two $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters in high profile judicial race:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-gives-away-two-1-milli...

It appears the Right has a thing for Wisconsin judges.

The feds have been lying in their court filings for the past few months, so don't take their complaint at face value.

I'd wager dollars to donuts this is a "You'll beat the rap but you won't beat the ride" intimidation tactic: the FBI knows it doesn't have a case, but they don't need to have a case to handcuff the judge and throw them in jail for a few days. That intimidation and use of force against the judicial branch is the end in itself.

> wager dollars to donuts

Donuts at the local grocery store are $7/dozen. If you're somewhere with generally higher prices, this bet might not be as lopsided as it's traditionally meant to be.

The day old ones are $6/dozen here. The fresh ones are $1 each.

You'll be happy to know, then, that the judge was released on her own recognizance.

I don't think you understood my point: there's no undoing the arrest, which was the only real goal here. The administration is publicly demonstrating that it can perform wrongful arrests of judges with impunity. They don't care if they get released later.

What's being alleged is that she escorted the person out a rear entrance that is only used by juries and defendants who are in custody, not defense attorneys or free defendants. It is alleged that she interrupted the defendant on their way out the regular customary door and guided them through the rear door instead.

If those allegations are true (which is a big if at this stage), it's not hard to see how that could be construed to be a private act taken outside the course of her normal duties to deliberately help the defendant evade arrest.

That doesn't make what she did morally wrong, of course, but there is a world of difference between the kind of abuse of power that many people here are assuming and someone getting arrested for civil disobedience—intentionally breaking a law because they felt it was the right choice.

Did you read the warrant? They did not demand the judge tell them anything. They knew he was there and were waiting outside the courtroom to arrest him. The judge confronted them and was visibly upset. She directed the agents elsewhere and then immediately told Ruiz and his counsel to exit via a private hallway. The attorney prosecuting the case against Ruiz and his (alleged) victims were present in the court and confused when his case was never called, even though everyone was present in the court.

"elsewhere" here means "to the correct location they should have gone in the first place, to give notice of, and gain approval for, their actions"

it's a pretty important detail

> it's a pretty important detail

It doesn't seem like it matters here. Per 18 USC §1071:

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 of such person, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned.

Unless you're arguing that the facts are misrepresented, or that the law is somehow unconstitutional, this seems pretty slam-dunk, no? The judge seems to have deliberately escorted the defendant to the jury room for the purpose of letting them hide/escape arrest. That's all there seems to be to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/25/us/judgedugan...

Not sure that applies to arbitrary documents that the bearer claims is a warrant, rather than a judge-signed warrant.

Either way, it wasn't illegal to send them to where they needed to go, and it wasn't illegal to let this dude use another door, so the illegality seems to depend on whether the executive can concoct their own warrants without any oversight and gain arbitrary access for arbitrary reasons.

> The judge seems to have deliberately escorted the defendant to the jury room for the purpose of letting them hide/escape arrest.

Was the judge, beforehand, served with a judge-signed warrant indicating that they intended to, and were authorized to, arrest this person? If not, then it wasn't letting them escape arrest, it was letting them escape from 2 random dudes who may or may not even be law enforcement, much less law enforcement judicially authorized to arrest the dude.

It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process. And "I don't even know if you're actually law enforcement" is not an excuse for ignoring law enforcement; what you do is ask for credentials and verify them. Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, but this seems pretty cut and dried to me. We'll see how it plays out in court.

> It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process.

Lol: by that logic, Steve who lives in a van down by the river can scribble himself a napkin that says "warrant" on it. After all, "It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process", and Steve who lives in a van down by the river has a process and a warrant.

> I don't even know if you're actually law enforcement" is not an excuse for ignoring law enforcement

Maybe, maybe not. "You never presented me with a valid warrant" is, though, and a judge would know better than cops what a valid warrant is.

> Lol: by that logic, Steve who lives in a van down by the river can scribble himself a napkin that says "warrant" on it. After all, "It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process", and Steve who lives in a van down by the river has a process and a warrant.

What? Did you not read it says a process that "has been issued under the provisions of any law of the United States"?

The laws of the United States say that Steve can scribble "warrant" on a napkin. Has this judge ruled that this ICE "administrative warrant" is any more valid than Steve's for the purposes of this case? Obviously judges, not the executive branch, are the deciders here.

The constitution (which is supreme to laws), along with common law, put restrictions on which pieces of paper that say "warrant" actually get to function as warrants, and judges, like this one, have the last word on interpreting the constitution and laws.

"when ICE officials left to talk with the chief judge on the same floor, Dugan took the pair to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor"

This is a private act and involved a private hallway

This leaves out a couple important things, at least from the complaint -

1 - ICE never entered the courtroom or interrupted. They stayed outside the room, which is public, but the judge didn't like this and sent them away.

2 - The judge, having learned the person in her courtroom was the target, instructed him to leave through a private, jury door.

These are from the complaint, so cannot be taken as fact, either.

Under any occasion, it was inappropriate to arrest a judge like this.

We’re honestly at the point where I’d be comfortable with armed militias defending state and local institutions from federal police. If only to force someone to think twice about something like this. (To be clear, I’m not happy we’re here. But we are.)

why do you think the people willing to be a part of the armed militias you mention are NOT on the same way of thinking as what ICE is attempting to do. that's just how the militia types tend to lean, so I don't think this would have the effect you're looking for

> that's just how the militia types tend to lean

So far. I don’t think you’d have trouble recruiting an educated, well-regulated militia from folks who believe in the rule of law.

you'd be declared an illegal immigrant and removed to hotel salvador pretty quickly at this point. The orangefuhrer has already said he's coming after the "homegrown" next.

At what point will Democratic state governors and legislatures have enough of autocratic takeover? States have their own National Guard.

While I'm not familiar with all 50 governors, I'm wondering if there might not be some Republican governors that think things have gone too far as well. Being a Republican does not mean you are in favor of autocracy. It just looks like that right now because nobody is sticking their necks out, but I'm holding onto hope that if it does get to that point, further resistance might come out.

You might want a State Guard, which might be a little harder to federalize than the National Guard

we'll see if/when the lawsuits lauched against the administration is ignored by the administration. But no one wants a civil war. No one would win here except maybe China/Russia.

You discount the people that want to watch the world burn. The tree of...fed with blood...blah blah blah. "Burn it down, start over" is often touted as the fastest/best approach for wholesale changes when the friction to making change is too great.

Economically, China would probably be the biggest beneficiary to a US civil war, especially one that ended with 2 Americas with neither the strength of the former union. Russia would just love to see the chaos and reap whatever gains they could get as well.

and something tells me the side that spent decades demonizing firearm ownership probably can't win an arms race against their ideological opponents.

didn't think of that salient detail

What a strange set of ideas presented in such a small sentence fragment.

* Very few people demonize gun ownership. They just want some laws preventing criminals from owning guns.

* Guns are very easy to obtain, the "arms race" is a trip to the local sporting goods store. Sure, the weapon may not be super tacti-cool with a bunch of skulls and shit, but I'm pretty sure that even without all the virtue signalling decals it does the primary job just fine.

Do you think those that have been opposed to current gun laws would be nearly as proficient at the use of their newly acquired weapon as opposed to those that have been collecting them for years?

This just made up militia will be woefully untrained to handle anything. At least those that have their meeting in the woods practice to whatever extent they do, but that would be so much more than this recent trip to the sporting goods store.

Whether you want to quibble over the words demonize, there are a lot of people that do not interpret the constitution to mean that just any ol' body can own a gun to the extent we allow today. The well regulated militia is part of that amendment, and gets left out quite conveniently. The local police departments are closer to the idea of a well regulated militia. The national guard are even closer of a match to me. The guys that run around in the woods believe they are fulfilling that role, but nobody really thinks they are well regulated other than whatever rules they choose to operate.

Personally, I do not think that what we have today with the NRA and what not is what the framers had in mind. So you complain about demonizing being wrong and clearly on one end of the spectrum. I think that the NRA refusing any limits on guns is clearly the other end of that spectrum

> Do you think those that have been opposed to current gun laws would be nearly as proficient at the use of their newly acquired weapon

I don’t own a gun and I’m a better shot than half those militia types. The purpose of the guns isn’t to shoot them, it’s to deter. By the time it’s WACO, one side’s marksmanship isn’t really relevant.

You can have 20 assault style weapons in your gun safe, but if that's where they are they do not act as a deterrent. They are only a deterrent when they are ready to be used. The purpose of a gun is to be shot. Confusing this is just some very excessive bending of logic. The intent of the shooter is an entirely different matter. They were not manufactured and then sold/purchased just to be in a display case. That's just what someone decided to with their purchase.

In fact, If you have 20 assault rifles in your safe you are a target for 20 or so revolutionaries. Oligarchs aside, most people of the hoarding political persuasion mistrust others and couldn't social engineer their way out of a paper bag.

I've taught people who had never held a gun to shoot. It takes an hour or two to get them to the point where they can get a nice grouping at a reasonable distance.

I haven't owned a gun in 20 years (it's not my style). I go shooting every 3-4 years with some gun nut buddies who have big arsenals and go shooting often. I am a better shot than many of them.

Armies have won wars while being comprised mostly of conscripted people who hadn't held a gun prior to the conflict breaking out.

Point being - effective use of guns does not require deep proficiency nor long term regular training.

Being able to shoot a gun at a paper target in the safety of a gun range is one thing. It's a different thing to do that when it's a person in front on you. It's also a totally different thing when that person in front of you is persons plural in the form of a trained opposing force and the bullets are coming at you. It takes training to quell that fear and be able to react in a manner that does not end with you full of lead.

When I've discussed training in this thread in other comments, this is what I was considering. Not target practice. Not being able reload a weapon. Specifically about mentally holding it together to not freeze, or even loose your ability to aim at something not a paper target in a gun range.

> Being able to shoot a gun at a paper target in the safety of a gun range is one thing. It's a different thing to do that when it's a person in front on you

Sure. I’m saying that the physical condition of most “militia” members doesn’t make for a threatening force.

In any case, if America went low-burn civil war, you’d pay the drug gangs to do your dirty work. The reason that’s the 20th century playbook is it works.

As drug gangs are discovering drone solutions, I wonder how far the USA is from functioning guns being as useful as prop guns in a civil war.

> They just want some laws preventing criminals from owning guns.

Criminals - you mean like illegal immigrants and those who aid and abet them?

The courts are a bit split on this. Recently in illinois a judge found an illegal immigrant is not a prohibited person if they meet some standard of community ties/integration, although I've totally forgotten what criteria the judge used.

Remember that the McDonald case incorporated the second amendment to the states so the judges have to decide these sorts of questions for people who are out of status.

I mean criminals: people convicted of a crime for which one of the punishments is revocation of gun ownership rights.

The important word here is convicted. As we were all taught in elementary school - there is a process required by the constitution in which a person goes to a special meeting (called a trial) where a whole bunch of people examine evidence and ask a lot of questions about that evidence to determine if a person is a criminal. If the decisions is they are a criminal, then they have been convicted. HTH!

That's not true.

You do not need to be convicted, you do not even need to be charged.

Since this is a hot topic, look at Abrego Garcia. His wife filed a restraining order. The initial order was slightly different than the temporary order 3 days later, which added one thing -- surrendering any firearms (this is bog standard, they do this in Maryland even for citizens). No matter that she did not even bother to show up for the adversarial final order, so he had his gun rights taken totally ex-parte without even a criminal charge or a fully adjudicated civil order nor any chance to face his accuser wife. Even david lettermen had his gun rights temporarily revoked because a woman in another state claimed he was harassing through her TV via secret messages in his television program [].

But that's not all, you can totally have gun rights taken away without any civil or criminal process. If you use illegal drugs, you cannot own weapons either, that is established without any due process to decide if you use or not, simply putting down you use marijuana on a 4473 will block a sale as will simply owning a marijuana card whether you use marijuana or not.

[] http://www.ejfi.org/PDF/Nestler_Letterman_TRO.pdf

This is exactly my point, and what I've been driving at in this thread.

This could not possibly be a concern based on abrogation of due process - because there have been many similar due process violations concerning firearms, and I've never seen a single article submitted here about those.

Frankly, I don't see how immigration is any more relevant to this site than civil rights.

first knee jerk type answer is that there are a lot of people in the tech industry that are here on some sort of visa and are not citizens which means that they very much are subject to any changes to immigration enforcement.

OK - so based on this, you're 100% opposed to "red-flag laws"/"extreme risk protection orders", right?

>* Very few people demonize gun ownership. They just want some laws preventing criminals from owning guns.

Don't gaslight us. Democrats have been pushing civilian disarmament HARD recently.

Restricted magazine sizes, requiring all transfers to go through a FFL, basic features bans, permits to purchase, restricting ammo purchases to FFLs raising prices, and now repeated attempts at semi-auto bans.

This isn't focused on criminals, it's trying to discourage firearm ownership in general. When states ban the federal government marksmanship program from shipping firearms to civilians AFTER they have already been background checked by a federal agency it's clear there is no attempt to stop criminals.

https://old.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/ is a thing.

Lots of people with a variety of political stripes own guns and are just less vocal about it.

We've got National Guards under the command of state governors for a reason. Just sayin'.

> We've got National Guards under the command of state governors for a reason.

Yes, but that reason is not for rebellion against the federal government, which is why their equipment and training is governed by the federal government and the President can by fiat order them into federal service at which point he is the C-in-C, not the government.

Most states do also have their own non-federal reserve military force in additionto their National Guard, but those tend to be tiny and not organized for independent operations (e.g., the ~900 strength California State [not National] Guard.)

If the federal government is no longer beholden to the law because the king executive refuses to follow or enforce inconvenient laws, would it be appropriate to consider it a rebellion? It seems more like basic law enforcement to me.

I was under the impression that state governors could refuse to federalize their National Guards. A quick read on Wikipedia points to the Constitution saying it would take Congress for the federal government to take command unilaterally. That could be a sticking point by the time it gets to the point where there is enough support for state governors to be deploying their state National Guards to keep the peace versus the lawless federal executive.

> I was under the impression that state governors could refuse to federalize their National Guards.

They cannot, under the Constitution. Of course, at the point the National Guard is being mobilized to prevent actions of the federal government, we are deep into a constitutional crisis and a short distance from a (possibly very brief) active civil war.

> A quick read on Wikipedia points to the Constitution saying it would take Congress for the federal government to take command unilaterally.

Congress has already done so , setting rules which require only a Presidential determination to invoke [0], and Presidents have used the authority so granted specifically to deal with very much the same state rebellion scenario you suggest, notably Eisenhower in 1957 when the Arkansas National Guard was deployed to prevent the implementation of a federal court order integrating Central High School in Little Rock: Eisenhower did the one-two punch of federalizing the entire Arkansas National Guard, ordered them away, and also deployed the Army (101st Airborne) to enforce the order. [1]

[0] in the Insurrection Act; the specific relevant provision is at 10 USC § 252: “Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” (emphasis added)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine

I mean, we're deep into a constitutional crisis right now - the president has asserted himself to be a king unbeholden to the law, and installed loyal supplicants who agree with that interpretation. So the check of the judiciary (required for individual liberty, among other things. and as imperfect as it was) is effectively dead.

I keep looking for angles where we can organize bottom-up within existing governance structures to resist this anti-American tyrant, that won't just result in an escalation where any resistance is attacked and the chaos then used as fuel for more support of authoritarianism (like the police riots of 2020). Something besides the single obvious lever of getting Congress on board with impeachment.

At any rate thank you for responding. By your other comments I knew you'd be able to point to something specific. The National Guards could certainly still play a role in defending the United States as this conflict escalates, but that baseline dynamic creates a much higher bar to clear.

Why don't you organize one?

> Why don't you organize one?

I live in Wyoming. Our courts aren’t being attacked.

I’d absolutely be open to lending material support to anyone looking to lawfully organise something like this in their community, however.

This is basically what Ammon Bundy did, and most of the US hates him for it. The federal government tried many times to jail him but ultimately he was found innocent everytime. Finally they managed to get him by a friendly judge who had a husband high up in the BLM, awarding an ungodly high lawsuit when he helped an innocent mother get her baby back by summonsing his protest-militia to protest a hospital that conspired to have the baby taken by child services.

Seriously, listen to some videos of Ammon Bundy actually speak (he is pro immigration rights as well, despite the 'far-right' label). Not what you hear from the media or others or under the influence of a political agenda. Most of what he says is 99% in line with your thought process here.

> most of the US hates him for it

Invisible enemies are hard to rally against.

It is illegal in all 50 states to organize a militia.

I know what study you are reading and the case it uses to argue that is highly flawed.

This is the one I remember from years ago:

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...

I'm not sure what case you mean

Are you talking about a federal case? That I don't know anything about, this is mostly just state law stuff

It is legal in all 50 states to organize a militia, it is illegal in all 50 states to do certain things as a militia including (the exact rules vary by state) things like participating in civil disorder, planning to participate in civil disorder, training for sabotage or guerilla warfare, etc.

Of course, since the purpose being suggested here is literally the purported urgent need to engage in armed rebellion against federal authorities, the concern that organizing a militia for that purpose would be constrained by merely "organizing a militia" being illegal is a bit odd. Waging war against the federal government, or conspiring to do so, is--even if one argues that it is morally justified by the government violating its Constitutional constraints--both clearly illegal and likely to be subject to the absolute maximum sanction. The legality of organizing a militia in general hardly makes a difference, either to the legal or practical risk anyone undertaking such a venture would face.

Fair, I should have explicitly stated "it's illegal in all 50 states to organize a militia for this purpose"

(Edit: also if we're being pedantic about it, >25 states have laws against forming private militias at all)

The charge seems colorable to me, and I think most people would agree the judge was obstructing justice if you strip out the polarizing nature of ICE detentions.

If you take the charges at face value, Law enforcement was there to perform an arrest and the judge acted outside their official capacity to obstruct.

Yes except that the very same armed types, after years of being derided by Democrat and progressive types as ignorant rednecks, are the least likely (for now at least) to defend a judge being targeted for protecting immigrants by the Trump administration. I know of no armed militia types that are of the opposing political persuasion, being armed is just a bit too kitsch and crude for them it seems. Maybe they reconsider their views of armed resistance in these years.

I guess you weren't there for the CHOP, where there were masked antifa wandering around with AR-15s and intimidating business owners.

Maybe those groups are better at disguising themselves.

> I.e. the ICE agents showed up in the middle of a court proceeding, and the judge said they'd need to get permission from the chief judge before they could interrupt proceedings. The judge then didn't stop the defendant from leaving once the proceeding was done.

Do you have any evidence of this claim? The FBI affidavit says they were waiting in the public hallway outside, let the bailiff know what they were doing and did not enter the courtroom. The judge did not find out until a public defender took pictures of the arrest team and brought it to the attention of the judge. Maybe the FBI lied, but that seems unlikely given the facts would seem eventually verifiable by security video and uninvolved witness statements.

  Members of the arrest team reported the following events after Judge DUGAN 
  learned of their presence and left the bench. Judge DUGAN and Judge A, who 
  were both wearing judicial robes, approached members of the arrest team in 
  the public hallway.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...

> the ICE agents showed up in the middle of a court proceeding, and the judge said they'd need to get permission from the chief judge before they could interrupt proceedings. The judge then didn't stop the defendant from leaving once the proceeding was done.

I used to work as a paramedic. We’d frequently be called to the local tribal jail which had a poor reputation. People would play sick to get out of there for a few hours. If the jail staff thought they were faking and they were due for release in the next week or so, they’d “release” them while we were doing an assessment and tell them “you are getting the bill for this not us” (because in custody the jail is responsible for medical care). Patient would duly get in our ambulance and a few minutes down the road and “feel better”, and request to be let out.

The first time this happened my partner was confused. “We need to stop them” - no, we don’t, and legally can’t. “We need to tell the jail so they can come pick them back up” - no, the jail made the choice to release them, they are no longer in custody and free to go.

This caught on very quickly with inmates and for a while was happening a couple of times a day before the jail figured out the deal and stopped releasing people early.

What would have been the right move for Dugan here, according to ICE?

Can a judge legally detain a defendant after a pre-trial hearing on the basis of "there are some agents asking about you for unrelated reasons?"

It's not related to legal proceedings, so, no.

The point of the arrest is to pressure judges into illegally doing it anyway.

My thoughts exactly.

Judges have what most people would consider insane levels of legitimate power while sitting on the bench itself inside the courtroom. Just outside the door, those powers are not quite so intense, but he can have you thrown in a cage just for not doing what he says, and he can command nearly anything. He could certainly demand that someone not leave the courtroom if he felt like doing so, and there would be no real remedy even if he did so for illegitimate reasons. Perhaps a censure months later.

you need a warrant and established PC, and you need to request administrative recess of court in session. You cant stay in the framework of US law while walking into court and expect a judge to transfer custody of a defendant because you say so.

According to ICE? "Comply with whatever we say". It's obvious that the current admin is operating autocratically, outside the law.

The right move would have been simply to not help Flores-Ruiz evade ICE.

Allegedly.

He showed the defendant out a side door to help him avoid ICE, who were waiting at the main door.

> What would have been the right move for Dugan here, according to ICE?

The right move was to not violate the law by taking steps which were intended to help the defendant evade ICE.

I was not aware of this accusation when I made my original comment

>Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest. The man was taken into custody outside the courthouse after agents chased him on foot.

This might change the calculus.

This to me seems like a completely lawful act on the part of the judge?

> It sounds like the arrest isn't because of any official act of the judge, but rather over them either not telling the ICE agents where the person was or giving them the wrong information about their location.

No, that is the excuse. They found a technicality on which they could arrest her, so they arrested her because they wanted to arrest her. Needless to say people don't get tried on this kind of "look the other way" "obstruction" as a general rule. This case is extremely special.

It is abundantly clear that this arrest was made for political reasons, as part of a big and very obvious public policy push.

> They found a technicality on which they could arrest her, so they arrested her because they wanted to arrest her

If by technicality you mean correctly identifying that the judge intentionally adjourned the suspect's court proceedings and directed them through a non-public exit in order to evade a lawful deportation of a domestic abuser who had already been deported once, yes, it was a "technicality". The short form would be to acknowledge the judge intentionally interfered with a lawful deportation, which is a crime, thus the arrest.

Hold up, all that stuff is completely unattested (and would have to be facts tried before a jury anyway). ICE does not have the power to decide on whether someone is a "domestic abuser" or whatever. They were just serving a warrant.

But more: What if the suspect was in court on an immigration concern? The judge would have been empowered to enjoin the deportation, no? You agree, right? That's what courts do? In which case, wouldn't the ICE agents be the ones guilty of "obstruction" here?

The point of the Rule of Law is that you don't empower individuals to make decisions about justice, ever. You try things before courts, and appeal, and eventually get to a resolution.

Trying to do anything else leads to exactly where we are here, where one arm of government is performatively arresting members of another for baldly partisan reasons.

>Hold up, all that stuff is completely unattested (and would have to be facts tried before a jury anyway).

I mean, it was going to be attested until the judge decided to adjourn his proceedings and push him out the back door to avoid ICE. He's charged with domestic abuse.

>But more: What if the suspect was in court on an immigration concern?

Based on my limited understanding of immigration law I'd agree that there's probably a valid mechanism for the judge to legally intervene in the deportation to let the immigration concern be addressed -- but that isn't what happened here. The defendant was there for a criminal charge of domestic abuse and the judge essentially canceled his hearing and snuck him out the back to prevent ICE from executing a legal order to deport someone who is here illegally and has already been deported once before.

>The point of the Rule of Law is that you don't empower individuals to make decisions about justice, ever.

That's why the judge is being arrested, because she as an individual skirted legal process to interrupt a lawful deportation (allegedly).

The ICE agents didn't have a warrant, so the judge was under no legal obligation to say anything to them at all.

according to this story, they had a warrant: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/23/ice-...

note that ICE often attempts to treat administrative warrants as judicial warrants, and it's unclear from this reporting what they actually had

[edit: it was an administrative warrant, not an _actual_ judicial warrant]

So just as valid as a piece of scratch paper with "WARANT" scrawled on it with a crayon.

Writing "WARANT" in crayon on a piece of scratch paper will not give you the authority to detain someone who is in the country illegally. It is my understanding that a valid ICE administrative warrant gives an ICE officer the authority to detain the person named on the warrant. And in cases like the one in question where ICE has ample time to get the warrant, it is my understanding that an ICE officer without the warrant would not have the authority to detain someone who is in the country illegally.

What the ICE warrant doesn't give is the authority to conduct a search of private property without permission. Which the agents in this case were not attempting to do.

According to the story you linked, they claim they had a warrant but the judge and other staff say the warrant was never presented.

Further, ICE has a habit of lying about this. They refer to the documents they write as "administrative warrants", which are not real judicial warrants and have no legal standing at all. So when ICE says they presented a warrant it's important to dig in and see if it was one of their fake ones.

Here's an article about that last point from the same source you used: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/2025/04/23/what-is...

Doesn't seem to make sense that ICE should be able to interrupt a preceding at will.

And the fact that they left and came back and someone they wanted wasn't there, that's on them....

Since there were multiple agents (the reports and Patel's post all say "agents" plural) they could have left one at the courtroom, or outside, rather than all going away. Then there'd have been no chase and no issue.

The question is if the judge should have held the man or not for the agents who chose to leave no one behind to take him into custody after the proceeding finished.

I wouldn't be surprised if the agents are required to stay together when doing deportation arrests because they don't know when an immigrant might revert to their demon form and incapacitate a lone officer.

while funny, there is a reason for federals coming in pairs so they can act as a witness for the other with things like lying to a federal officer.

this doesn't sound like the plural just meant 2 here, so it really does come across as Keystone Cops level of falling over themselves to not leave behind someone to keep an eye on their subject.

I'd bet on malicious compliance so they can show that their good and honest work is being impeded by elitist judges.

> The question is if the judge should have held the man

This is bananas. The judges (or anyone else for that matter) should not be able to hold this man (or any other man) without an arrest warrant.

ICE doesn't issue warrants, because they can't. Immingration matters aren't criminal, and ICE are not law enforcement, though they certainly love to cosplay as some sort of mix between law enforcement and military.

That's why ICE has to "ask" law enforcement to hold on to someone who gets arrested on another matter, and why plenty of police departments tell them to go pound sand.

ICE does issue warrants [0].

Some immigration matters are criminal. There are specific immigration law enforcement officers that execute warrants.

Maybe what you mean is that ICE warrants grant different authorities than an arrest warrant (ie, can’t enter private property to execute).

[0] https://www.ilrc.org/sites/default/files/resources/ice_warra... https://www.ilrc.org/resources/annotated-ice-administrative-...

Immigration violations are not criminal matters, they're civil. Further, they're federal, not state.

You cannot be held by law enforcement or the judiciary for being accused of a civil violation.

I thought they were misdemeanor crimes [0] punishable by jail time.

So they are crimes, but not huge.

I’m not a lawyer or a law enforcement officer, but I thought that local law enforcement can certainly hold someone charged with a federal crime. Eg, if someone commits the federal crime of kidnapping, then local cops can detain that person until transferred to FBI.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325

For all the judge could have known, the agents weren't coming back.

To your question - A state judge cannot be required to hold someone on behalf of federal agents. That's federalism 101 and settled law.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/sanctuary--supremacy--h...

But judges can be arrested for doing nothing illegal to intimidate and bully them into not acting based on settled law.

The claim is different. Agents with an arrest warrant waited in the public hallway, as asked and required by the judges.

The judge skipped the hearing for the target and [directed] them out a private back door in an attempt to prevent arrest, leading to a foot chase before apprehension.

Edit: directed, not escorted

That information came out after my comment, and also long after the edit window. The updated FBI claim is certainly more damning for the judge (actively impeding their efforts).

This sounds like a case in Trump’s first term. I don’t condone the arrest, but to provide context:

> In April [2019], [Shelley Joseph] and a court officer, Wesley MacGregor, were accused of allowing an immigrant to evade detention by arranging for him to sneak out the back door of a courthouse. The federal prosecutor in Boston took the highly unusual step of charging the judge with obstruction of justice…

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/us/shelley-joseph-immigra... (https://archive.ph/gByeV)

EDIT: Although Shelly Joseph wasn’t arrested, only charged.

I don't think we've got enough information to say how similar it is. That one sounds like it hung on Joseph actively helping the immigrant to take an unusual route out. If this judge just sent the agents off for their permission then wrapped things up normally and didn't get involved beyond that, I can't see this going anywhere.

There's a lot of room for details-we-don't-yet-know to change that opinion, of course.

According to a "sources say" quote from a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article published two days ago:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/23/ice-...

Sounds like some lower-level ICE agents screwed up, and let the subject get away, and they're trying to redirect blame to the judge. I doubt this will stick, barring any new info on what happened.

Going from "redirect blame" to "make an arrest" is a significant escalation.

That's the main tactic this administration uses, isn't it? Double down, never admit fault, get into a giant trade war with the rest of the world...

Looks like I was wrong. For some reason I wasn't aware the that judge smuggled the subject out through the back door that goes through the judge's chambers, which typically judges avoid allowing the general public into, because it implies improper fraternization between a judge and someone involved in court cases.

IANAL but... The agents had no official role in the proceedings, and if they did not request one, then they have the status of courtroom observers (little difference from courtroom back row voyeurs) and they can go jump in a lake.

>you can't lie to the feds

We really need a court case or law passed that says a stalked animal has the right to run (lie) without further punishment resulting from the act of running (lying). Social Contract™, and "you chose it" gaslighty nonsense aside, the state putting someone in a concrete camp for years, or stealing decades worth of savings, is violence even if blessed-off religiously by a black-robed blesser. Running from and lying to the police to preserve one's or one's family's liberty should be a given fact of the game, not additional "crimes."

We also need to abolish executions except for oath taking elected office holders convicted of treason, redefine a life sentence as 8 years and all sentencing be concurrent across all layers of state, and put a sixteen year post hoc time limit on custodial sentences (murder someone 12 years ago and get a "life sentence" today as a result? -> 4 years max custody). Why? Who is the same person after a presidential administration? What is a 25+ year sentence going to do to restore the victims' losses? If you feel that strongly after 8 years that it should have been 80, go murder the released perp and serve your 8!

The point is to defang government; it has become too powerful in the name of War on _______, and crime has filled the blank really nicely historically.

"Dugan took the pair to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor"

This is clearly facilitating escape and interfering with law enforcement. "Private" is the key word here.

> not telling the ICE agents where the person was or giving them the wrong information about their location.

Officers of the court have a higher responsibility to report the truth and cooperate with official processes than regular citizens.

Umm… why didn’t the agents just wait patiently until the proceeding was done?

I don't think I've ever encountered a CBP employee I'd describe as "patient".

LEOs are trained to "be the one in control"

It does seem like they could have gotten what they wanted by just trying to do their job a little more such as, waiting.

They did, read the complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...

The judge got upset that they were waiting in the public hallway outside the courtroom.

One side alleges that, to be clear. We haven't heard the judge's version, heard from witnesses, seen evidence, nor had it adjudicated.

Reading through that, it does seem like a very hasty decision on the judge's part. But then again, I don't know what else you're supposed to do if you think the warrant for the arrest is based on an unjust premise (Which Dugan presumably thought, otherwise I have no idea why she'd act the way she did). This does make it pretty clear that the arrest of the judge is justified, unless there are some special provisions for judges that I'm unaware of that allow judges to be exempt from title 18 code 1071 and code 1505, which is entirely possible since the most relevant thing about US law I know is jurisprudence. Barring that possibility, what should be more on the top of everyone's minds is how this is resolved in court.

the unusual thing here is that they're using them against a reasonably politically-connected person who's not their main target.

This is a pissing match between authorities. ICE has their panties in a knot that the judge didn't "respect muh authoriah" and do more than the bare leglal minimum for them (which resulted in the guy getting away). On the plus side, one hopes judge will have a pretty good record going forward when it comes to matters of local authorities using the process to abuse people.

>(They're normally akin to the "we got Al Capone for tax evasion" situation --

Something that HN frequently trots out as a good thing and the system working as intended. Where are those people now? Why are they so quiet?

>someone they were going after, where they couldn't prove the main crime, but they could prove that they lied about other details.)

And for every Al there's a dozen Marthas, people who actually didn't do it but the feds never go away empty handed.

She was convicted for lying, not for the trading.

That was exactly what I meant by "the feds don't go away empty handed".

She didn't actually do the thing they went after her for so they found some checkbox to nab her on rather than admit defeat.

"respect muh authoriah"

ICE officers seem like the ones that couldn't make it through police academy and had no other career prospects. Much like the average HOA, these are people who relish in undeserved power they didn't have to earn.

As a society, we owe it to ourselves to make sure people whom we give a lot of power to actually work and earn it.

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