> Patel announced the arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan in a post on the social media platform X, which he deleted moments after posting. The post 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.
Federal agents have been using this to charge people for nearly a century [1]. Personally I find the law itself repellent, and more often than not it is used to manufacture crimes out of thin air. But if the article is accurate, then nothing has changed - the law is simply being applied evenly, and judges are not above the law.
The thing that has changed is that 6 months ago, directing federal agents away from an illegal immigrant couldn't be rationalized by one's oath to the Constitution committing one to a belief like "I don't think anyone should be blackbagged and sent to foreign torture prisons for the rest of their lives without due process."
Sure, the law is the law, but it's certainly not true that nothing has changed.
Or to put it another way, if the enforcement of a law cause an action contrary to the USA Constitution then just as before a judge should block that action; previously - presumably - when applying this law it was being done constitutionally.
A judge aiding unidentified assailants (not bearing any insignia of office and hiding their identity) attempting to abduct a person and send them to a death camp would be supremely objectionable in any democracy.
Being a judge might just be circumstantial (sensational?). The arrest may be because of the person's personal actions; not their professional actions as a judge.
But I imagine arresting a judge requires an extra level of discretion. At the very least it's going to be a PR problem if it is found to be unwarranted.
> Being a judge might just be circumstantial (sensational?). The arrest may be because of the person's personal actions; not their professional actions as a judge.
I'm sure you're an intelligent person, but this response seems almost deliberately obtuse. This is clearly an act by the current administration to intimidate the judiciary. It is impossible to separate the unprecedented act of arresting a sitting judge for failing to arrest someone on behalf of ICE from the administration's illegal (according to the Supreme Court) sending immigrants to a prison in El Salvador without due process.
You misread the article, or perhaps failed to see the update.
This is not "making false statements in a personal capacity." The judge was arrested for failing to do ICE's job for them. That is, ICE wanted to arrest someone and the judge didn't stop them from walking away once ICE had left their courtroom.
> After directing the arrest team to the chief judge’s office, investigators say, Dugan returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” before ushering Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer through a jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse. The action was unusual, the affidavit says, because “only deputies, juries, court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back jury door. Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.”
You're right, I didn't see this update. And while this is indeed not "making false statements" (although it does not rule that out), it's a far cry from "not doing ICE's job for them".
> the law is simply being applied evenly, and judges are not above the law.
We obviously don't know the details yet, but this case does sound like it's on the more frivolous end of such charges. If they actually wanted to prosecute on it, they'd need to convince another judge/jury that this judge didn't just make a mistake about where the targeted person was supposed to be right then. This kind of prosecution normally involves comparatively more concrete things -- say, someone claiming to have no idea about a transaction and then the feds pulling out their signature on a receipt.
Of course, this could be a case where the judge knew the person was in a waiting room because they'd just talked to them there on camera, and then deliberately told the ICE agents they were on the other side of the courthouse while they were recording everything.
Federal agents have been using this to charge people for nearly a century [1]. Personally I find the law itself repellent, and more often than not it is used to manufacture crimes out of thin air. But if the article is accurate, then nothing has changed - the law is simply being applied evenly, and judges are not above the law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements