This seems lite on facts. Even if I wanted to arrest a sitting judge, it would have to be an act of gross malfeasance to motivate me to even consider arrest. The only thing I can think of… Is, if the judge swore under oath, affidavit, or something like that, that she did not do something when in fact that she did. But even then…
If Patel does not come back with some thing on that level or better, then this was a horrible farce.
> Key prohibited actions under 8 U.S.C. § 1324 include:
> Bringing in or Attempting to Bring in Aliens: Assisting a non-citizen to enter or try to enter the U.S. at a place other than an official port of entry.
> Transporting: Moving or attempting to move a non-citizen within the U.S., knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the non-citizen has entered or remains in the U.S. unlawfully, and acting in furtherance of their unlawful presence.
> Harboring or Concealing: Concealing, harboring, or shielding (or attempting to do so) a non-citizen from detection, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the non-citizen has entered or remains in the U.S. unlawfully. "Harboring" generally means providing shelter but can also include other forms of assistance that help the person evade immigration authorities.
> Encouraging or Inducing: Encouraging or inducing a non-citizen to come to, enter, or reside in the U.S., knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such entry or residence is or will be in violation of law.
> Conspiracy or Aiding/Abetting: Engaging in a conspiracy to commit, or aiding or abetting the commission of, any of the above acts.
Why are they terrible? I do not understand why people have a right to enter the country illegally and stay without consequences, nor why people should be able to assist them without consequences. What sane argument is there for that? That is just anarchy and madness.
I don't have issues with (immigration) laws targeting undocumented immigrants. I don't have issues with laws targeting organization of illegal immigration.
I do have issues with laws targeting regular people knowing/not knowing legal status of other people in day to day life. Those laws are vogue and overly broad and constrain my rights as a citizen. I should be able to transport anyone, regardless to my knowledge of their immigration status, and shouldn't be turned into participant of the immigration enforcement. These laws are too similar to "turn every jew you know" to me, and should be forbidden. I come from a country with a history of delation and I think it's wrong.
Demanding this is very distant from anarchy and madness, and I would argue current state is too close to police state.
Psychological projection is a very apt choice, thank you for that. I’ve read a lot of people referring to “sanewashing” when the media tries to explain the mechanism behind the madness but this captures it much better.
It's a kind of fundamental error we make as humans: we judge the actions of other peoples by the standard of how we would behave, rather than the other person's past conduct or personality. And then we often work backwards from the action we see, guessing at what would have to be true for _us_ to act that way.
That's not what sanewashing is. It's when the media hides someone's insanity, often out of a misplaced notion of "balance". This applied especially to their failing to talk about all the crazy stuff Trump said at his rallies, and their constantly reframing of the unhinged things Trump said in much more sane terms.
I think it’s more weird that the person being a “sitting judge” is any party of the equation. At the end of the day judges are just people. I would be more worried about a system that proceeded differently because they were a judge.
Judges are "just people" that make up the only one of three branches of government that seems interested in maintaining a system of checks and balances.
I would like for cops to be more humane in arresting people and stop going to place of work to grab people in front of their coworkers. But this seems like just as rude when they go to a “regular” person’s office in the middle of the day and arrest them.
The argument is that if they notify the accused beforehand they may flee. But I don’t buy this as many people will likely turn themselves in if notified. I’m guessing an ai could predict with 99% accuracy people who will self surrender and save everyone embarrassment (and money).
I’m talking about the reason why ICE was unable to arrest the suspect that is the nominal reason the FBI arrested this judge.
It seems as if the facts that the suspect was in the judge’s court and then not arrested by ICE at that point aren’t contested. And that seems like a weird thing to happen.
She would not have been arrested if she wasn't a sitting judge on a case involving an allegedly undocumented person. This is all about the Trump administration's ideology and whipping boy.
> The New York Times observes that Kash Patel has now deleted his tweet (for unknown reasons) and adds that the charging documents are still not available.
Kash Patel tweeting in real-time indicates that he aware of it and at some-level involved with the arrest. It also shows that he sees this as a totally reasonable action and response - and wants the public to know about it.
I stated a position and viewpoint, GP said "no that's not the only option." but didn't elucidate anything.
So yeah, state something affirmative that can be responded to. And again, don't be disingenuous about how effective those options would be, this is not the same America we were in even 4 months ago.
I didn't ask or wish for us to get this point. But this is it, right here. Either there are consequences for violating the rule of law or we keep sliding further and further into despotism.
... As opposed to the numerous civilians who are currently being killed by government forces without repercussion due to qualified immunity?
Though having said that, I'm not sure if qualified immunity would apply in the same way to ICE officers. If that hasn't been legally determined yet (remember - ICE didn't exist before 9/11, and legal determinations take time), and looking at how ICE is currently operating with impunity in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles... Things will get much worse than Kent State before they get better.
> Ten years after staging an armed standoff with federal agents on his Nevada ranch, Cliven Bundy remains free. As does his son Ammon, despite an active warrant for Ammon from Idaho related to a harassment lawsuit.
People also died during the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which was an extension of the Bundy standoff. I think it's fair to say that these are kinds of showdowns between federal and state/local forces are fraught with danger for those involved.
Thank you, I hadn’t come across this news story yet! Believe it or not, I just double checked and it’s not in my Apple News feed at all.
It sounds like there was a language barrier and he misidentified himself as being in the country illegally. That’s very unfortunate that he was detained for that misunderstanding.
You missed one of the biggest news stories that has been running for months across every available medium (television, radio, internet, even here on HN)?
You want to shed some light on how that's possible, especially in the context of you commenting on this thread?
I usually get my left leaning news stories from Apple News and my right leaning news from the Daily Wire. I didn’t see this story on any of my usual sources.
Many of the people currently being stripped of their rights and deported are documented, legal visa and green card holders or documented and legal asylum seekers.
Even illegal immigrants need to be deported through due process. That’s the entire part where the government is supposed to demonstrate that they are here illegally. We are currently skipping that part and essentially granting the executive branch unilateral authority to deport anyone to foreign labor camps as long as the press secretary says the words “illegal immigrant” or “MS-13”.
To make things even worse, these deportations are being overtly politically targeted. If you’re here on a legal visa and speak against this administration, they are making it clear that they will strip you of your visa and disappear you without a second thought and without an opportunity to defend yourself.
You are correct that the law is dead. You are embarrassingly mistaken about who killed it.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I am for reducing illegal immigration, but I am firmly against how ICE/this admin is doing it and I feel that the states should be pushing back against the attacks on due process.
The problem(s) are...
- lack of due process (Constitution doesn't distinguish between legal and illegal residents)
- leading to deportation of legal residents (Garcia case from MD)
- sending illegal immigrants to a jail that's hosted abroad is NOT deportation in the normal sense of the word - it closer to our holding of detainees at Gitmo post-9/11.
I wish people would stop trying to argue that the constitution affords due process to both legal and illegal residents like you are doing here. It does, but that’s missing the forest for the trees.
If all the government has to do is say “they’re here illegally” to get a free pass to do whatever they want to someone, then even legal residents don’t have rights. Due process is the entire mechanism behind which the government can establish something like illegal residency. As soon as you say Group A has the right to a trial and Group B doesn’t, calling someone a member of Group B is all it takes to subvert the entire legal process.
Isn't that what I just said? We already have the legal processes in place (based on the Constitution) to deport illegals in the correct (legal, safe, etc) way. The Trump administration is ignoring that existing process to score political points with their political base.
Couple that with their attempted demonization of the judicial branch and it's a recipe for a "first they came for the socialists..." situation.
Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to necessarily single you out.
I just hear the argument that the constitution gives both illegal and legal residents that right and conservatives simply respond that illegals shouldn’t have rights and that’s that.
It needs to be hammered in that due process is necessary even to establish the legality of their residency in the first place, otherwise the government can disappear whoever they want as long as they invoke the illegal immigrant boogeyman.
1. It is being done without due process.
2. One high-profile mistake has already been made; and a man is now languishing in a Salvadoran prison.
3. The conditions of detention are often horrendous. I would support upholding their laws if they executed them a shred of human decency and empathy.
This is a perfectly reasonable response during normal presidential administrations. However, this administration is credibly[1] accused of avoiding due process via the current deportation process.
I'll include a quote from the (9-0!) April 10th Supreme Court ruling[1] concerning the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to El Salvador.
> The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.
Without a chance to demonstrate that someone is in the US legally (i.e., Due Process), the defense of this action can be that it's necessary to prevent the rendition of US citizens to El Salvador or elsewhere. That might sound crazy, but we already have an example of a US citizen being held in custody per an ICE request, despite having proof of being born in the US[2]. If both practices continue, we'll ultimately see the intersection at some point.
No, absolutely not. Trump would federalize the national guard as did Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson and charge the governors with treason. You advocate for de facto succession of the states - we settled that matter with blood last time. The next time will be far worse.
The rule of law does not prohibit bad arrests nor can it. The rule of law provides the opportunity for remedy after the fact.
When the federal government is actively hostile towards the states then the only recourse is going to be secession.
> The rule of law does not prohibit bad arrests nor can it. The rule of law provides the opportunity for remedy after the fact.
In a world where you and I could be renditioned to a foreign country and thrown into slave labor by the government simply acting fast enough as to maneuver around the court then there is no rule of law and there is no remedy.
That’s not really a viable recourse as it will result in that state being force ably retained in the union.
I think a better remedy is to work within the laws of the country and to elect different federal representatives (president, senator, house representatives).
Secession would definitely be worse for any state attempting it.
How are you or anyone else going to remedy anything when you're half a world away, with no access to anyone let alone _anything_ outside your death camp?
Absolutely yes. This needs to stop right here, and the consequences for violating the rule of law, for violating due process, for violating human rights, must be real.
Every public official in every state has sworn an oath to uphold the constitution. Willfully ignoring that oath whenever it suits them is not a faithful commission of their duties. While trampling on civil rights is a problem so is harboring known, convicted felons.
If Wisteguens Charles had been deported in 2022, some of his future crimes wouldn't have happened. Instead we have people falling over themselves to have sympathy for the worst elements of society and ignoring the oath they made to uphold the law. That doesn't justify twisting the law into a tool for cruelty but is no better to arbitrarily ignore it either.
No one was harboring anything. Also, have a quote:
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” - H.L. Mencken
> Every public official in every state has sworn an oath to uphold the constitution.
"...against all enemies, foreign and domestic." (I'm quite aware, having taken -- and signed -- that oath many times.) That includes a federal executive that is repeatedly and consistently violating due process, engaging in the slave trade, exceeding Constitutional powers by bad-faith invocation of war powers with no actual war, and violating the first amendment by retaliating against unwelcome political speech in the context of and under the pretext of immigration enforcement.
For people _alleged_ to be among the worst elements of society. If they're that bad, try them, get your slam-dunk conviction, and jail them here.
Deportation does not annihilate a person, or shift them to another astral plane, it moves them a few dozen or hundred or thousand miles away. The counterfactual for 'if so-and-so was deported' is unknowable. They might have just walked back in the following week.
> 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 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.
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".
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, but: freedom for "me". The libertarian HN posters are in favor of unlimited freedom for themselves and a police state for everyone else, especially non-Americans who dare to exist in America.
And yet many people calling themselves "Libertarian" signed themselves up for full-throated support of this fascist wannabe dictator. Their supposed interest in "freedom" doesn't extend past their own interest in oppressing others. The dynamic is especially pronounced in the surveillance industry, where digital authoritarianism gets a pass by appealing to the individual fantasy of creating your very own digital authoritarian startup.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
How is this being followed? Specifically,
"nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
This is what people are upset with, not your (loaded language) "violent immigrants"
The way I read it is that US citizens have a right to not be murdered or assaulted by people who enter the country illegally.
So it seems like a Judge would have an obligation to prevent someone accused of being in the country illegally and accused of a violent crime to not leave the courthouse and instead turn that person over to the federal authorities who are outside the court waiting for the proceedings to finish.
Being accused of a violent crime is not the same as being guilty of a crime. She has obligation to conduct her court in an orderly fashion that ensures due process and compliance. Police marching into proceedings of the court administering due process and trying to arrest people in front of the court without even providing a warrant violates all sorts of laws - including the fact the judge has say over the events in their court and the disposition of the accused during the session. This is crucial because if people who are at risk from arrest by federal authorities are routinely arrested when they appear before the court, people will stop appearing before the court. This means the administration of justice breaks down fundamentally and victims have no real opportunity to press their cases. If someone is a murderer or committed assault we should absolutely NOT deport them. We should send them to prison and punish them; then deport them. However this structure of ICE using the courts to make their burden of finding people easier breaks that system for the expediency of ICE, but our system isn’t built for the expediency of the police but for the expediency of justice.
I assume you can understand that the 'illegal' part is found as a result of the 'due process' part.
Otherwise, do you have any proof that you're not an illegal criminal? Is there any reason why I should not turn you in for crimes against the state and have you deported?
This is the key is that the president presides over the execution of the law created by the legislature under the framework of the constitution as judged by the judicial. The president being elected by a vast majority l to do X isn’t license to achieve X under any method - let alone by a minority of the electorate. The presiding over the execution under the law is by constitutional construction an administrative role, and the political promises made to be elected are not justification to break the constitutional order of the republic. The promises made must be executed legally and constitutionally, and when the law and the constitution prohibits that execution, the president must break their promise to the electorate. That’s the order of things and it’s entirely intentional. I expect this from any elected president regardless of party, promises made, or any other details of the situation. Anyone who doesn’t see this is either a) not particularly committed to the American system of government, b) not particularly literate of the system, or more often than not likely both.
So, yeah, “Trump promised to do X so he’s doing it by any means necessary” doesn’t hold water. And it’s specifically shocking coming from people who have been howling about the “other sides” overreach. I just can’t understand if it’s just hypocrisy, if it’s naked ambition to overthrow the democracy and replace it with a single party system, blindness to the overreach - but it’s probably the most disturbing part of all of this. If the “others” did these things and that was a problem, why is it ok for your guy to do it too ?
> On one hand I find the current administration's approach to deportations too heavy-handed, but on the other hand it seems almost necessary because of the level of obstruction at the judicial level compared to the Obama era
This is just "ends justifies the means" via hand waving. If you claim to have principles at least stand by them.
Not really. I want law and order to be upheld for the benefit of the broader society. If this can't happen due to systematic obstruction, then it's not a violation of my principles to be less critical of toeing a line I'd otherwise not like to see breached. If we all had hard lines drawn in the sand that never moved around, this wouldn't even be a conversation, because 15 years ago mass deportations were uncontroversial.
It would help to discuss this using the same terms. This is not different from the "due process" that others talk about. I would presume you don't think that due process is needlessly obstructive but you also seem to think this obstruction is needless. If I'm wrong, what am I wrong about? If I'm not wrong, why do you think this obstruction is needless?
The idea is that the justice system should work in a reasonable way so that victims and potential victim rights are protected.
For example, someone who allegedly beat their wife, has a right to a trial. But if activist judges make decisions that cause the trial to not take place for 10 years that is obstructive and the alleged victim doesn't get justice or protection from future assaults. So if that person is deported before the trial you could complain about lack of "due process" but you would be ignoring the rights of the victim.
In my understanding, the Obama administration expelled 2.5 million illegal immigrants under the same emergency powers now being invoked by the Trump administration and did bypass standards of "due process" being raised today to block deportations. If it's practically impossible to expel the illegal immigrants allowed in via open border policies over the previous term, that's dysfunctional and the standards should be relaxed.
This case is particularly egregious, as the judge personally helped a violent illegal immigrant evade law enforcement outside of her jurisdiction, which explains the arrest; but "systematic obstruction" refers to the injunctions being issued constantly to block executive actions, suggesting that the Trump administration's attempts to reverse open border policies are subjected to a much higher standard than Democrats were under Obama just 15 years prior when they correctly viewed illegal immigration as a problem.
> In my understanding the Obama administration expelled 2.5 million illegal immigrants under the same emergency powers now being invoked by the Trump administration
The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked was about two decades before Barack Obama was born.
> If it's practically impossible to reverse open border policies that let in a flood of illegal immigrants for almost 4 years
The US hasn't had anything like open borders policies for more than a century (more precisely, since the original national origin quota system was adopted in 1921.)
It's probably easier to discuss policy in this area if the premises are something resembling facts rather than partisan propaganda fictions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?'
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>* 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.
> 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)
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.
Party composition changes over time, and the people who made up the KKK switched parties starting when JFK backed the civil rights movement. It's the right wing militias that are the spiritual successors to the KKK, not the Democratic party.
As much as I wish we had a Republican party that was an actual successor to Lincoln's, that's not how political parties work.
I said the process started with JFK. Trump moved the needle a lot in the last 8 years, too, so it clearly wasn't finished then either and probably still hasn't finished, because parties are messy dynamic things that change all the time.
I never saw myself voting Democrat until 2016, yet here we are three elections later and it's looking like I'd better settle in.
> > Party composition changes over time, and the people who made up the KKK switched parties starting when JFK backed the civil rights movement.
> George "segregation forever" Wallace got a number of votes at the 1976 Democratic National Convention
1.89% of the votes, yes. "Starting when" doesn't mean "immediately completed on" (the mainly civil rights-related phase of the unusually long overlapping realignment period that started with the New Deal, as well as the realignment period itself, completed around the mid-1990s; if you wanted to stake a specific endpoint marker for it, immediately after the 1994 midterm elections is probably the best point.)
> and controlled that Party well into the 1980s.
George Wallace obviously never "controlled" the Democratic Party, and certainly not into the 1980s. (Now the state party in Alabama, sure, but the state party and the national party are not the same thing.)
> As much as we don't want it to be, it's the same Democratic Party.
It's not, and you can tell it is not by seeing which of the major parties people waving confederate flags and openly preaching white supremacy demonstrate for and advocate for and turn out for on election day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
If vibes based epistemology works for you, great. Otherwise, it's my username because it's my birth name, feel free to complain to them or consider the Shel Silverstein and Johnny Cash song about a boy's name.
The source link is there for anyone to assess validity and I acknowledge in the comment that the FBI isn't an unimpeachable source. It also isn't so totally careless that an agent would make an affidavit for something that can easily be proven untrue under light scrutiny.
> It's entirely plausible that a politically motivated set of agents decided to punish this judge.
Do you mean the agents decided to punish the judge by staging an immigration arrest in order to elicit allegedly unlawful and weird behavior?
The assertions of the affidavit do not have bearing upon whether the proceedings afterward are political in nature or not.
The judge adjourned the alleged wife beater’s hearing without a motion known to the victims or prosecution who were all there waiting. Leaving everything else aside, that is behavior that indicates prejudice for the defendant, a real WTF move.
> 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).
Judge (or the courthouse in some regard) assured immigrants-of-interest^ would not be detained in courthouse, to speed up legal proceedings and to try to ensure equitable justice was being served.
An immigrant was identified by ICE and the judge directed ICE somewhere and when the immigrant was not apprehended (maybe appeared in court for his 3 BATTERY misdemeanors), the FBI was called in to arrest the judge at the courthouse for obstruction. Immigrant of interest was apprehended.
That sound about right? Bueller? Bueller?
^ The immigrants of interest are of varied legal status, so I'll just say "of interest".
We don't know if that's correct because, unless it's surfaced in the last hour, we haven't seen anybody's account of what happened before the arrest (other than some high-level appointees tweeting).
Can't edit, but I've seen a few more detailed timelines that roughly correspond to the parent post.
The judge didn't want ICE screwing up her courtroom (as is her right), so she declined to allow them to serve the warrant in her court.
ICE went to her boss (different part of building).
Meanwhile, she concluded her hearing with the immigrant in question and then sent him down a private stairway to exit the building.
When ICE heard what she did, they had a warrant issued for her arrest, which was then served by the FBI. So, somebody did convince a local magistrate (not a full-blown judge) to issue that warrant.
My take (IANAL)... the judge was not in the wrong for decling to serve the initial warrant. But sending the guy down a private hallway was a dumb move. Was it a federal crime? Doesn't seem like it - a slap on the wrist from her boss probably should have been sufficient.
Really, just more of the Trump administration throwing their weight around and pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable in the US.
This will be interesting for the 5th amendment. They cannot arrest you for putting "drug dealer" on your tax forms as your job since you are compelled to answer that question honestly. The defendant was compelled to appear in court which means he couldn't protect his own privacy by being elsewhere - are these the same thing?
I don't know how courts will see it, but it is an interesting legal question that I hope some lawyers run with.
They cannot use your tax forms as evidence against you, but if there is a warrant for your arrest, they can arrest you wherever they find you. If there's a warrant for my arrest on suspicion of murder and I show up to court to argue a traffic ticket, of course they'll take me in on the murder charge too.
ICE works on “administrative warrants” that are different than “judicial warrants” [0]
I didn’t know the difference until today when I was reading about the case. I think the difference is the ice warrants are like detention orders and are different than a judge’s arrest warrant that grants a lot more power.
Yes, an arrest warrant was issued. From the complaint[1]:
> On or about April 17, 2025, an authorized immigration official found probable cause to believe Flores-Ruiz was removable from the United States and issued a warrant for his arrest. The warrant provided, “YOU ARE COMMANDED to arrest and take into custody for removal proceedings under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the above-named alien [Flores-Ruiz identified on warrant].” Upon his arrest, Flores-Ruiz would be given a Notice of Intent/Decision to Reinstate Prior Order. He would then have an opportunity to contest the determination by making a written or oral statement to an immigration officer.
He'd been deported in 2013 and snuck back in some time later. He was in Milwaukee county court that day because he'd been charged with three counts of domestic battery.
This is not normal/acceptable in the US. I remember when parallel construction was thought of as a horrible/unacceptable violation of the Constitution in the US. Now the 'Constitution' party doesn't give AF and loves it. It's crazy how far we let slippery slopes take us. All because of convenience or 'it's not that big of a deal yet'.
Schedule C to Form 1040 (self-employment income) asks for your "Principal business or profession, including product or service". It's pretty clear that the only correct answer for some people would be something like "drug dealer".
Those are a far cry from street drug dealer, not really incriminating yourself if you do that, you're just lying. They don't have codes for illegal activities
This doesn't really have any fifth amendment implications. The prohibition against self incrimination reads "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
That doesn't relate to being compelled to attend a proceeding in person where another federal agency can arrest you. If the government can legally arrest you, it does not matter if they determine your location based on another proceeding.
The thesis is that immigrants have no constitutional rights because they aren't citizens, or the stronger form, that they are invaders and thus enemy combatants.
The Supreme Court is going to have to clarify the existence or non-existence of constitutional rights for people living here unlawfully. And then the populace is going to have to make sure that the president doesn't conclude that he can ignore that ruling if he doesn't like it.
On that basis tourists have no constitutional rights either. I find it hard to believe anyone would want to visit the US now, but surely that has an even further chilling effect.
To be clear, I agree. It's a dangerous thesis, but also just idiotic. They're doing a speed run of turning the US into North Korea, where nobody will want to travel here or trade with us.
> The Supreme Court is going to have to clarify the existence or non-existence of constitutional rights for people living here unlawfully.
I'm not a lawyer, but... they already have for decades or centuries, and not in the direction that MAGA wants.
> “Yes, without question,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a professor at Yale Law School. “Most of the provisions of the Constitution apply on the basis of personhood and jurisdiction in the United States.”
> Many parts of the Constitution use the term “people” or “person” rather than “citizen.” Rodriguez said those laws apply to everyone physically on U.S. soil, whether or not they are a citizen.
[...]
> In the ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
Granted, only that last one is actually the Supreme Court. Perhaps there are hundreds of Supreme Court cases testing individual pieces of the constitution, but as the professor said, for the most part they give all the same rights. MAGA has managed to make everyone doubt and argue over it. The party of "Constitution-lovers" flagrantly violating both the plain wording and decades of legal rulings on the Constitution.
Yeah I don't doubt any of this myself. But the Court is still going to have to rule on it. Which isn't so weird. The Court has to reiterate rulings sometimes.
The thing that is unusual is that I have some genuine uncertainty around whether the current Justices will try to give the executive more leeway here than they should, as "compliance in advance" out of concern about their rulings being ignored by this administration.
> The thesis is that immigrants have no constitutional rights because they aren't citizens...
The constitution is quite clear on this issue and it has been affirmed repeatedly over the last 100+ years by the high courts. Anyone and everyone in the world who is on US soil and subject to US jurisdiction is considered a "US Person". This status is regardless of their nationality/nation of origin, the manner by which they arrived on US soil, or any other circumstance.
As a 'US Person' they are protected by the US Constitution with only minimal exceptions; the right to bear arms[1], ability to run for public office, or vote in federal elections[2]
This is by intent and design and is a necessary cornerstone of US democracy!
This is laid out in - Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 "Aliens in the United States"
> The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as persons guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Thus, the Court determined, even one whose presence in this country is unlawful, involuntary, or transitory is entitled to that constitutional protection
[1] Only citizens and permanent residents are allowed unrestricted access to firearms.
[2] Some districts allow pr visa holders to vote in local and state elections
Since the Judiciary seem to be the only ones pushing back against the Federal overreach it makes sense to them go after them first.
I don't expect Congress to start getting arrested until or if they ever do any significant pushback against Trump and his cronies.
This is America now, the land of the lawless and unjust. Prepare accordingly people, if they do not like what you are doing they will use their full power to stop you.
Almost no one disagrees with enforcing federal immigration law. The pushback has to do with the illegal manner in which it's happening in reality.
One of the most pernicious memes among the pseudo-intellect crowd is isolating an event from its context and then saying "see, not a problem in isolation!" But these things are not happening in isolation.
With high enough levels of motivated pseudo-intellectual dissection, you can portray a fatal car crash as a series of mundane procedural details and then just say "what bearing does the fatality have on it?"
If you have reason to believe that someone will be deprived of due process, which the Trump administration has essentially assured us, then it's a serious ethical violation to allow that to happen in your jurisdiction.
And by the way, the reason why due process is important is that it's all that stands between you and me and a permanent vacation in El Salvador, if we do or say something that offends the Trumpists sufficiently.
If there is an invasion of millions of people, are you suggesting the federal government would have to merely say that you are one of them in order to pack you and your family into an airplane to a foreign slave camp for the rest of their lives, without even giving you an opportunity to argue that you're not one of those "invaders"?
I trust the government to reasonably determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant. The courts can determine if that process is reasonable. I don't think illegal immigrant "invaders" are entitled to due process (especially when they are gang members).
If we didn't have that then we'd have a gaping hole for foreign adversaries to exploit. Send their people to do harm, bog down our courts, and our government has no recourse.
Does every enemy combatant get "due process" when they are engaged by US military personnel? No.
Are police officers required to provide "due process" when using their firearm on a dangerous perp? No.
We entrust them with the agency to act accordingly and there are systems for review.
It was a yes or no question, but hey I guess a comment literally 100% full of incorrect information works too.
> I trust the government to reasonably determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant.
Your trust is demonstrably misplaced. We already know with 100% certainty that American citizens have been detained beyond the permissible 24hr window without charges. We already know with 100% certainty that completely legal immigrants were deported.
> The courts can determine if that process is reasonable
They have. 9 to 0, SCOTUS said the process is not reasonable.
> I don't think illegal immigrant "invaders" are entitled to due process (especially when they are gang members).
Can you show me this carveout in the 14th or 5th Amendments? (You can't)
> Does every enemy combatant get "due process" when they are engaged by US military personnel? No.
Are US military personnel regularly engaging enemy combatants within US jurisdiction under which the 14th and 5th Amendments apply?
And in any case, even abroad: yes there is a process for legally authorizing specific military engagements.
> Are police officers required to provide "due process" when using their firearm on a dangerous perp? No.
Using your firearm on a dangerous perp is only legal in an immediate defense context, it is not a legal punishment for breaking the law.
If you want to use your firearm on a dangerous perp as legal punishment, then yes, they will get due process first. It's called being "sentenced to death," and is pretty much the most elaborate form of due process we have.
> We entrust them with the agency to act accordingly and there are systems for review.
Funny you say that, because the current administration's argument is quite literally the opposite. Their specific legal argument is that courts do not have any right of judicial review over their deportations.
It's patently anti-American to deny people due process. Refusing to give information to fascists who believe they have no restraint of jurisdiction is the lesser of two evils here.
Hey, regardless of your stance on borders and immigration, maybe let's not normalize defending the United State's horrible immigration law enforcement as it stands by doing this weird interrogative gotcha game.
> I don't expect Congress to start getting arrested until or if they ever do any significant pushback against Trump and his cronies
They won't, or they would have done so already. Granted, I'm not an American so I might be seeing things the wrong way from the other side of the planet, but it has been 3 months already, enough time for Congress to at least be seen as doing something, anything.
There are two types of warrants being talked about here, traditional judge signed warrants and "administrative"/"ICE" warrants. The first one carries the ability to perform a search and possible detainment subject to the 4th amendment protections, the latter allows for discretion under the 4th amendment (this may be an viewed as an unconstitutional search) the Judge exercised their discretion with respect for constitutional rights.
It's a sad day in America when people do actually enforce the rules get trapped by other rules.
> It's a sad day in America when people do actually enforce the rules get trapped by other rules.
The people who enforce the rules being bound by the rules is precisely the way it is meant to work. Of course, it remains to be seen if any laws were actually broken.
This feels like a “break glass in case of emergency” kind of moment. Sure there are no details yet, but I’m trying to imagine details which would make me think “that arrest makes sense.” If I were in Milwaukee I’d be in the streets.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Our federal government is completely compromised by a violent, oligarchical ruling class, and so are many state and local governments. Elected and unelected officials are breaking law and convention left and right.
If that immigrant is there, then they're going to have to show up to the court proceedings. The time to intercept said person is directly after the hearing takes place, but these morons have no problem interrupting a hearing to take someone into custody. This is about the executive trying to walk all over the judicial branch.
Correct. By the article's details, it does not seem that the judge lied to the agents but rather told them some inconvenient step they had to perform per the Court's jurisdiction. Trump's Schutzstaffel can put on their big boy pants and make grownup decisions like whether they all need to run in one direction like Keystone Cops, or whether maybe someone should remain following their target. In the best case it sounds like they were idiots who didn't like the repercussions of their own actions. In the likely case, they deliberately did the stupid thing so they'd have a pretext to attack the judge and push us even further into strongman authoritarianism.
That is far from clear. The facts are emerging slowly; so the sequence described below may ultimately be inaccurate… but, ICE agents interrupted a court hearing. The judge presiding over the hearing asked the agents to leave. When they returned, the subject whom the ICE officers were seeking had already left. Is there a law that compels a judge (or anyone, for that matter) to remand someone sought by ICE to their custody? I genuinely don’t know, but were I put in a similar situation I would not hand anyone over to ICE custody given their terrible human rights history. Laws be damned; they and the administration whom they represent are moral failures.
I think the claim underneath the comment above is that immigration laws have been not been enforced or unevenly been enforced. On principle, advocating for a consistent application of the law seems sensible. This goes along with advocating for the rule of law.
Let's talk about justice, too. Many people believe true justice transcends any particular instantiation of the law at any particular point in time. If so, advocating for the consistent application of all laws can only be truly just if the laws are just.
Look at present circumstances. Reporting has shown that Trump is doing extraordinary rendition: removing people without due process. And not bringing them home after admitting the mistake. Once this reality is factored in, where is the justice in consistently applying a law in order to extrajudicially render a person?
Clearly, the Trump administration has a double standard regarding the rule of law and the role of the judiciary.
Note: this comment surely needs another draft, but I'm running out of time. I welcome all criticism.
P.S. At the risk of surfacing even more complexity, even if a system were to consistently apply one set of criteria, such as ICE's authority to arrest, it is likely that other criteria apply; namely, allocating personnel in a way that best carries out their overall mission. It is my (educated) guess that practical concerns (such as resource limitations) is one of the reasons courts give administrative agencies considerable flexibility in what laws they enforce.
It is in fact the Biden admin that played the game to win - importing tens of millions of people by opening the borders, loosening prosecution, flying them in, and basically doing anything and everything to allow it.
The American voters were never for this, always overwhelmingly against. It’s a non-partisan issue. Only big business and Democratic politicians benefit.
Then, when the new admin tries to remove illegal entrants, suddenly they care a lot about the law. Well, it was illegal for them to come, it’s legal to remove them. Due process only applies to citizens. There’s nothing more legal (and frankly popular with voters) than removing people who are here illegally. To import tens of millions without due process only to turn around and cry about needing it to remove them is the height of hypocrisy and also would be giving them de-facto citizenship, it would take years in court to process each one, where it takes only a couple days to cross the border.
Generally speaking, if you lie to cops or other federal agents you can be arrested on a number of grounds, including obstruction of justice, interfering with an arrest, or concealment.
The dumb part about this is the judge sends people to jail ever year for doing exactly this. She knew what he was doing was illegal, she just didn't care.
Executive branch arrests of members of judiciary are not to be taken lightly. There are many ways to deal with these situations and this is extraordinarily far from normal. All you can do is diversify your US-based investments and get travel visas while you still can.
If you are tempted to downvote, you could make a better point by finding comparable examples under any other modern president.
One need not think this is good, just, or even lawful behavior by the FBI director, nor think this is in any way comparable to the behavior of Democratic administrations, to think it's irresponsible to advise people to "get travel visas while you still can."
I think it is reasonable to be prepared and have options to leave when basic civil rights and rule of law are being systematically tested and weakened on behalf of the most powerful individual in the country, who had sworn to uphold them. I would say it is irresponsible to ignore or minimize the magnitude of changes in the US in the past 100 days.
I didn't say to sell all belongings and move. I said to have a way out if it becomes necessary. The FBI is being weaponized against judges, right now, and this without any modern precedent.
That is an extremely important distinction. Further, there are legitimate actions by the FBI in the cases of real judges and representatives in their public corruption prosecutions (see Kids for Cash). In this case, though, the charges are intended to intimidate. That is exactly what the director's tweet communicated and why it was deleted.
> Didn’t Biden famously try to impeach/arrest Trump for a variety of reasons? I
Oh my god, no, that never happened at all. This is a fever dream. How in the world and constitution Could Biden IMPEACH Trump when he wasn't a member of the House of Reps, which is the body that impeaches Presidents. Actually, Biden also couldn't arrest Trump, as federal arrests would be by the AG. Famously, Merrick Garland took forever to bring cahrges to Trump, and, unlike Trump did with his AGs, Biden never interfered.
Do you have any sources for this "famous" impeachment and arrests?
> I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of so many attempts on the same president.
Because no other President tried to start a violent coup when he lost the election! That is a good reason to arrest someone, which is included in your vague "variety of reasons".
a federal agency that doesn't follow the law should lose the protection of the law. Charge the ICE agents with attempted kidnapping of the immigrant and actual kidnapping of the judge.
That statement isn't even close or applicable to any hypothetical actions the judge could have taken here. If the judge did something unlawful there are already lawful mechanisms for dealing with that and NONE of those mechanisms involve ICE detaining the judge.
> If the judge did something unlawful there are already lawful mechanisms for dealing with that and NONE of those mechanisms involve ICE detaining the judge.
ICE is not detaining the judge.
> But Brady McCarron, spokesman for U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., said Dugan is being charged with two federal felony counts: obstruction and concealing an individual. McCarron also confirmed Dugan was arrested at about 8 a.m. at the Milwaukee County Courthouse.
> U.S. Attorney Pam Bondi posted on X: "I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan – a county judge in Milwaukee – for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov."
Arrested by the FBI on behalf of claims from ICE. For not detaining someone extra-judicially in her own court room. There was no need to arrest someone here, especially a judge.
a judge doesnt enforce law, they are tasked with providing a neutral recourse to the overarching principal of justice, during the proceedings of the court.
I imagine they'll soon be putting a spin on George W Bush-era legal arguments about the applicability of Geneva Conventions on "non-uniformed combatants". In this case, if the ICE agents weren't uniformed at the time of arrest, they can't be considered agents of the federal government, and thus can't be subject to legal redress.
At the moment we don't have a lot of the facts. All we seem to have at this moment is a (since deleted?) post from the head of the FBI. There's a ton of context that is missing. Like what does "intentionally misdirecting" mean? Does that mean saying "he went that way" when he really went in the opposite direction? Does it mean not answering questions about this person, or being obtuse? I'd also like to know more of the circumstances here. Did ICE agents literally walk into court and question the judge while sitting on the bench?
Article has been updated with more context in recent minutes:
> 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.
So, yeah, sounds like they literally walked into court and interrupted a hearing. Given the average temperament of judges, I think the least immigrant-friendly ones out there would become obstructionists in that situation...
Or they walked into the hearing, sat in the back, and didn't interrupt it. These proceedings are almost always public, and theoretically you or I could walk in and sit quietly without violating any rules. Without knowing more, they could have just been waiting patiently for the hearing to end, and they would have arrested him outside the courtroom after he had left.
In that case, what the judge did does amount to willful obstruction.
> they could have just been waiting patiently for the hearing to end, and they would have arrested him outside the courtroom after he had left
Still doesn’t justify arresting a judge in a court house. This is incredibly close to where taking up arms to secure the republic starts to make sense.
That would really depend on what the judge did, though. If the judge said, “the guy you are looking for is with the chief judge” and it turns out he wasn’t with the chief judge, that sounds like obstruction. If the judge said, “the chief judge wants to talk to you”, and the chief judge really did want to talk to the ICE agents, is that obstruction? In that scenario, ICE could have just not gone to see the chief judge until after arresting the suspect, or just sent one of their agents to talk to the chief judge and leave the rest in the courtroom.
>That would really depend on what the judge did, though.
It would, of course. But we don't know what the judge did, and yet everyone here is interpreting the events in the least generous way possible. Next week, when there is another incident, they'll use their least generous interpretations of what happened here as fact to justify their least generous interpretations of that incident.
>If the judge said, “the guy you are looking for is with the chief judge” and it turns out he wasn’t with the chief judge,
Or, if he just said "you all need to leave, none can stay" with the intention of hurrying the proceeding along so that the immigrant could leave before they could possibly return, that too is willful obstruction.
>In that scenario, ICE could have just not gone to see the chief judge until a
The other comment says they were "asked to leave and talk to him for permission". Ask is courtroom code for "do this, or you'll be arrested for contempt and spend at least a few hours in a holding cell in the other part of the courthouse building". There was no "they could have just not gone".
> Or, if he just said "you all need to leave, none can stay" with the intention of hurrying the proceeding along so that the immigrant could leave before they could possibly return, that too is willful obstruction.
In the fact pattern you've given, we're getting dangerously close to prosecuting a judge for official acts taken in their courtroom. The only difference is that, in your fact pattern, the judge is doing this in bad faith, with the express intent of assisting this person evade arrest.
A Judge is required to maintain order in their courtroom and ensure that the docket runs smoothly. A bunch of ICE agents sitting in the gallery could definitely be interpreted as disruptive. If this defendant saw that or knew that, he would be likely to run. If ICE was going to arrest this person in the middle of a courtroom, that would also be disruptive. A judge is well within their rights to remove people from the gallery if they are going to pose a disruption.
Additionally, this is not new. Defendants walk into court with open warrants all the time. Police are not allowed to walk in and arrest defendants in the middle of court. I don't understand why ICE would be special.
>The only difference is that, in your fact pattern, the judge is doing this in bad faith, with the express intent of assisting this person evade arrest.
Which, if anyone were honest here, most would admit that they suspect that was the intent. You can't cheer on the judges who do this sort of thing as heroes upholding democracy in one thread, and turn around and in another say "well, they weren't even deliberately doing it, they're just following rules".
Can we prove the judge was acting in bad faith? I don't think that's very likely. But I'd be shocked if that wasn't really what was going on.
We're all being manipulated, you know. I still see 3 headlines a day about the "Maryland man", who isn't from Maryland.
>A bunch of ICE agents sitting in the gallery could definitely be interpreted as disruptive.
Sure, some could claim that. But I doubt they were hooting and hollering and pointing at the man, making intimidating gestures.
>If ICE was going to arrest this person in the middle of a courtroom,
Some here would claim that, but this is unlikely. They'd have waited for the proceeding to end, and followed him out the door. It still accomplishes what they want without pissing off a judge that they might need civility from next week or next year. If you're imagining they're causing trouble that won't help them accomplish what they want to accomplish simple for the sake of causing trouble and making Trump look bad... well, then what can I say?
>Police are not allowed to walk in and arrest defendants in the middle of court.
No one needs to do that. Those same police you're talking about wait until it's over, and arrest them in the hallway outside the courtroom. And they are allowed to do that. But then, most judges don't have soft spot for those criminals like they do for illegal immigrants.
Devil is always in the details. But judges have a ton of discretionary power, and in fact obligations to, maintain order in their courtroom. Someone who disrupts a hearing can be forcibly removed by the bailiffs, can be fined, and can even be found in contempt and summarily jailed.
I mean, what’s next? If a judge doesn’t sign off on a warrant because they don’t find probable cause, is that obstructing justice?
As autocracy expands, so does the definition of "poor".
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Wilhoit's Law
How many lawsuits were dropped and people pardoned at the discretion of the sitting president? Wasn't he the target of many legitimate lawsuits that were dropped? Didn't he pardon a bunch of people, including convicted fraudsters who grifted millions of dollars, relatively recently?
Somebody in particular is above the law, as are all his cronies.
Strictly true but practically false. SCOTUS decided in Trump v. United States that core Article II actions by the president are completely above the law. Official actions are presumed to be immune from criminal liability. Non-official acts are not immune but get a free trip up to SCOTUS for adjudication before any trial can start. The one exception is if Congress impeaches.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadIf Patel does not come back with some thing on that level or better, then this was a horrible farce.
> Key prohibited actions under 8 U.S.C. § 1324 include:
> Bringing in or Attempting to Bring in Aliens: Assisting a non-citizen to enter or try to enter the U.S. at a place other than an official port of entry.
> Transporting: Moving or attempting to move a non-citizen within the U.S., knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the non-citizen has entered or remains in the U.S. unlawfully, and acting in furtherance of their unlawful presence.
> Harboring or Concealing: Concealing, harboring, or shielding (or attempting to do so) a non-citizen from detection, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the non-citizen has entered or remains in the U.S. unlawfully. "Harboring" generally means providing shelter but can also include other forms of assistance that help the person evade immigration authorities.
> Encouraging or Inducing: Encouraging or inducing a non-citizen to come to, enter, or reside in the U.S., knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such entry or residence is or will be in violation of law.
> Conspiracy or Aiding/Abetting: Engaging in a conspiracy to commit, or aiding or abetting the commission of, any of the above acts.
TBH those are some quite terrible laws =(
I do have issues with laws targeting regular people knowing/not knowing legal status of other people in day to day life. Those laws are vogue and overly broad and constrain my rights as a citizen. I should be able to transport anyone, regardless to my knowledge of their immigration status, and shouldn't be turned into participant of the immigration enforcement. These laws are too similar to "turn every jew you know" to me, and should be forbidden. I come from a country with a history of delation and I think it's wrong.
Demanding this is very distant from anarchy and madness, and I would argue current state is too close to police state.
This logic projects rationality onto an administration that does not merit such assumptions.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/sanewashing
I would like for cops to be more humane in arresting people and stop going to place of work to grab people in front of their coworkers. But this seems like just as rude when they go to a “regular” person’s office in the middle of the day and arrest them.
The argument is that if they notify the accused beforehand they may flee. But I don’t buy this as many people will likely turn themselves in if notified. I’m guessing an ai could predict with 99% accuracy people who will self surrender and save everyone embarrassment (and money).
It seems as if the facts that the suspect was in the judge’s court and then not arrested by ICE at that point aren’t contested. And that seems like a weird thing to happen.
"And that seems like a weird thing to happen."
Um, no, because there are other things--the actual charges filed against the judge--that are contested.
A sitting judge is a sitting judge even when they are at home sleeping.
She is not "just a person" in this case.
I'm struggling with the dishonesty on grand display by some of the comments in this thread.
https://bsky.app/profile/sethabramson.bsky.social/post/3lnnj...
Activate their respective national guards and make it happen.
Yes, that means defying federal law. Yes that means exactly the consequences you want to draw from those actions.
There is no other option at this point. The law is dead in the U.S.
So yeah, state something affirmative that can be responded to. And again, don't be disingenuous about how effective those options would be, this is not the same America we were in even 4 months ago.
Just say you hate your fellow citizens and stop dressing up your weird violence?
Though having said that, I'm not sure if qualified immunity would apply in the same way to ICE officers. If that hasn't been legally determined yet (remember - ICE didn't exist before 9/11, and legal determinations take time), and looking at how ICE is currently operating with impunity in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles... Things will get much worse than Kent State before they get better.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/20/nx-s1-4966725/a-decade-after-...
> Ten years after staging an armed standoff with federal agents on his Nevada ranch, Cliven Bundy remains free. As does his son Ammon, despite an active warrant for Ammon from Idaho related to a harassment lawsuit.
The law is dead if states defy it by refusing to allow federal agents to enforce immigration law.
This whole stance is absolute madness.
Something very wrong with sending deportation notices or trying to sic immigration enforcement on American citizens.
I must have missed that, when did that happen?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/lopez-gomez-citizen-detain...
It sounds like there was a language barrier and he misidentified himself as being in the country illegally. That’s very unfortunate that he was detained for that misunderstanding.
You want to shed some light on how that's possible, especially in the context of you commenting on this thread?
Even illegal immigrants need to be deported through due process. That’s the entire part where the government is supposed to demonstrate that they are here illegally. We are currently skipping that part and essentially granting the executive branch unilateral authority to deport anyone to foreign labor camps as long as the press secretary says the words “illegal immigrant” or “MS-13”.
To make things even worse, these deportations are being overtly politically targeted. If you’re here on a legal visa and speak against this administration, they are making it clear that they will strip you of your visa and disappear you without a second thought and without an opportunity to defend yourself.
You are correct that the law is dead. You are embarrassingly mistaken about who killed it.
The problem(s) are... - lack of due process (Constitution doesn't distinguish between legal and illegal residents) - leading to deportation of legal residents (Garcia case from MD) - sending illegal immigrants to a jail that's hosted abroad is NOT deportation in the normal sense of the word - it closer to our holding of detainees at Gitmo post-9/11.
If all the government has to do is say “they’re here illegally” to get a free pass to do whatever they want to someone, then even legal residents don’t have rights. Due process is the entire mechanism behind which the government can establish something like illegal residency. As soon as you say Group A has the right to a trial and Group B doesn’t, calling someone a member of Group B is all it takes to subvert the entire legal process.
Couple that with their attempted demonization of the judicial branch and it's a recipe for a "first they came for the socialists..." situation.
I just hear the argument that the constitution gives both illegal and legal residents that right and conservatives simply respond that illegals shouldn’t have rights and that’s that.
It needs to be hammered in that due process is necessary even to establish the legality of their residency in the first place, otherwise the government can disappear whoever they want as long as they invoke the illegal immigrant boogeyman.
I'll include a quote from the (9-0!) April 10th Supreme Court ruling[1] concerning the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to El Salvador.
> The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.
Without a chance to demonstrate that someone is in the US legally (i.e., Due Process), the defense of this action can be that it's necessary to prevent the rendition of US citizens to El Salvador or elsewhere. That might sound crazy, but we already have an example of a US citizen being held in custody per an ICE request, despite having proof of being born in the US[2]. If both practices continue, we'll ultimately see the intersection at some point.
--- [1] -- https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
[2] -- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-u-s-citizen-was-held...
The rule of law does not prohibit bad arrests nor can it. The rule of law provides the opportunity for remedy after the fact.
> The rule of law does not prohibit bad arrests nor can it. The rule of law provides the opportunity for remedy after the fact.
In a world where you and I could be renditioned to a foreign country and thrown into slave labor by the government simply acting fast enough as to maneuver around the court then there is no rule of law and there is no remedy.
I think a better remedy is to work within the laws of the country and to elect different federal representatives (president, senator, house representatives).
Secession would definitely be worse for any state attempting it.
Absolutely yes. This needs to stop right here, and the consequences for violating the rule of law, for violating due process, for violating human rights, must be real.
There is no hypothetical here.
The "Cash for Children" judges got summons for Christ's sake.
Pam Bondi mere hours ago stated they would go after more judges like this. This isn't normal or right.
You're clearly not interested in good-faith discussion, good bye.
If Wisteguens Charles had been deported in 2022, some of his future crimes wouldn't have happened. Instead we have people falling over themselves to have sympathy for the worst elements of society and ignoring the oath they made to uphold the law. That doesn't justify twisting the law into a tool for cruelty but is no better to arbitrarily ignore it either.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” - H.L. Mencken
"...against all enemies, foreign and domestic." (I'm quite aware, having taken -- and signed -- that oath many times.) That includes a federal executive that is repeatedly and consistently violating due process, engaging in the slave trade, exceeding Constitutional powers by bad-faith invocation of war powers with no actual war, and violating the first amendment by retaliating against unwelcome political speech in the context of and under the pretext of immigration enforcement.
For people _alleged_ to be among the worst elements of society. If they're that bad, try them, get your slam-dunk conviction, and jail them here.
Deportation does not annihilate a person, or shift them to another astral plane, it moves them a few dozen or hundred or thousand miles away. The counterfactual for 'if so-and-so was deported' is unknowable. They might have just walked back in the following week.
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
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.
Sure, the law is the law, but it's certainly not true that nothing has changed.
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.
Using it on judges?
This creates an air of a two-tiered justice system. No one is above the law.
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.
If the article is accurate, he was arrested for making false statements in a personal capacity, not for failing to act.
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.
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".
https://x.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/1915800907318468626
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".
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.
This was definitely not them being helpful, but I'm incredibly doubtful that they could be successfully prosecuted for this.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
signed, an actual libertarian.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
This is blatant and unambiguous. "If you cross me, I will use executive power to destroy you". There is no optimistic view of this.
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.
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 an indictment of the cops, not the arrestee.
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?
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.
any one who keeps a hippocratic oath should not be performing procedures because they were "commanded" to, under pain of professional discreditation.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is the disconnect you're seeing. He was not in custody: he was appearing before a judge.
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
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
How is this being followed? Specifically,
"nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
This is what people are upset with, not your (loaded language) "violent immigrants"
So it seems like a Judge would have an obligation to prevent someone accused of being in the country illegally and accused of a violent crime to not leave the courthouse and instead turn that person over to the federal authorities who are outside the court waiting for the proceedings to finish.
Otherwise, do you have any proof that you're not an illegal criminal? Is there any reason why I should not turn you in for crimes against the state and have you deported?
So, yeah, “Trump promised to do X so he’s doing it by any means necessary” doesn’t hold water. And it’s specifically shocking coming from people who have been howling about the “other sides” overreach. I just can’t understand if it’s just hypocrisy, if it’s naked ambition to overthrow the democracy and replace it with a single party system, blindness to the overreach - but it’s probably the most disturbing part of all of this. If the “others” did these things and that was a problem, why is it ok for your guy to do it too ?
This is just "ends justifies the means" via hand waving. If you claim to have principles at least stand by them.
Did you vote for Trump in 2024?
It would help to discuss this using the same terms. This is not different from the "due process" that others talk about. I would presume you don't think that due process is needlessly obstructive but you also seem to think this obstruction is needless. If I'm wrong, what am I wrong about? If I'm not wrong, why do you think this obstruction is needless?
For example, someone who allegedly beat their wife, has a right to a trial. But if activist judges make decisions that cause the trial to not take place for 10 years that is obstructive and the alleged victim doesn't get justice or protection from future assaults. So if that person is deported before the trial you could complain about lack of "due process" but you would be ignoring the rights of the victim.
This case is particularly egregious, as the judge personally helped a violent illegal immigrant evade law enforcement outside of her jurisdiction, which explains the arrest; but "systematic obstruction" refers to the injunctions being issued constantly to block executive actions, suggesting that the Trump administration's attempts to reverse open border policies are subjected to a much higher standard than Democrats were under Obama just 15 years prior when they correctly viewed illegal immigration as a problem.
The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked was about two decades before Barack Obama was born.
> If it's practically impossible to reverse open border policies that let in a flood of illegal immigrants for almost 4 years
The US hasn't had anything like open borders policies for more than a century (more precisely, since the original national origin quota system was adopted in 1921.)
It's probably easier to discuss policy in this area if the premises are something resembling facts rather than partisan propaganda fictions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is way too tame a way to brand ignoring both due process and multiple court orders not to depoty people, including the supreme court.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
No, it will have an escalation effect. That's the problem. Starting with a massive crackdown on law abiding drone users.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
That's a general applicable law that prevents anyone - judge or not - from interfering with an apprehension.
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.
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.
Their only real purpose is fooling the gullible into confusing them for real warrants.
Interfering with an ICE apprehension is illegal. That's what this judge did, which is why the FBI arrested her.
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?'
---
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
What? Did you not read it says a process that "has been issued under the provisions of any law of the United States"?
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.
This is a private act and involved a private hallway
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
You cannot be held by law enforcement or the judiciary for being accused of a civil violation.
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
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/sanctuary--supremacy--h...
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
> 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.
There's a lot of room for details-we-don't-yet-know to change that opinion, of course.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/23/ice-...
> 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.
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?"
The point of the arrest is to pressure judges into illegally doing it anyway.
> 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.
>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.
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.)
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.
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.
* 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Criminals - you mean like illegal immigrants and those who aid and abet them?
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!
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 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.
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.
Lots of people with a variety of political stripes own guns and are just less vocal about it.
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.)
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.
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 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.
As much as I wish we had a Republican party that was an actual successor to Lincoln's, that's not how political parties work.
https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/why-did-the-d...
I never saw myself voting Democrat until 2016, yet here we are three elections later and it's looking like I'd better settle in.
> George "segregation forever" Wallace got a number of votes at the 1976 Democratic National Convention
1.89% of the votes, yes. "Starting when" doesn't mean "immediately completed on" (the mainly civil rights-related phase of the unusually long overlapping realignment period that started with the New Deal, as well as the realignment period itself, completed around the mid-1990s; if you wanted to stake a specific endpoint marker for it, immediately after the 1994 midterm elections is probably the best point.)
> and controlled that Party well into the 1980s.
George Wallace obviously never "controlled" the Democratic Party, and certainly not into the 1980s. (Now the state party in Alabama, sure, but the state party and the national party are not the same thing.)
> As much as we don't want it to be, it's the same Democratic Party.
It's not, and you can tell it is not by seeing which of the major parties people waving confederate flags and openly preaching white supremacy demonstrate for and advocate for and turn out for on election day.
That's how political realignments work.
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.
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.
Invisible enemies are hard to rally against.
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...
I'm not sure what case you mean
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.
(Edit: also if we're being pedantic about it, >25 states have laws against forming private militias at all)
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.
The judge got upset that they were waiting in the public hallway outside the courtroom.
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 didn't actually do the thing they went after her for so they found some checkbox to nab her on rather than admit defeat.
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.
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.
[edit: it was an administrative warrant, not an _actual_ judicial warrant]
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.
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...
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.
And the fact that they left and came back and someone they wanted wasn't there, that's on them....
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.
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.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...The source link is there for anyone to assess validity and I acknowledge in the comment that the FBI isn't an unimpeachable source. It also isn't so totally careless that an agent would make an affidavit for something that can easily be proven untrue under light scrutiny.
Do you mean the agents decided to punish the judge by staging an immigration arrest in order to elicit allegedly unlawful and weird behavior?
The assertions of the affidavit do not have bearing upon whether the proceedings afterward are political in nature or not.
The judge adjourned the alleged wife beater’s hearing without a motion known to the victims or prosecution who were all there waiting. Leaving everything else aside, that is behavior that indicates prejudice for the defendant, a real WTF move.
This is clearly facilitating escape and interfering with law enforcement. "Private" is the key word here.
Officers of the court have a higher responsibility to report the truth and cooperate with official processes than regular citizens.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Judge (or the courthouse in some regard) assured immigrants-of-interest^ would not be detained in courthouse, to speed up legal proceedings and to try to ensure equitable justice was being served.
An immigrant was identified by ICE and the judge directed ICE somewhere and when the immigrant was not apprehended (maybe appeared in court for his 3 BATTERY misdemeanors), the FBI was called in to arrest the judge at the courthouse for obstruction. Immigrant of interest was apprehended.
That sound about right? Bueller? Bueller?
^ The immigrants of interest are of varied legal status, so I'll just say "of interest".
The judge didn't want ICE screwing up her courtroom (as is her right), so she declined to allow them to serve the warrant in her court.
ICE went to her boss (different part of building).
Meanwhile, she concluded her hearing with the immigrant in question and then sent him down a private stairway to exit the building.
When ICE heard what she did, they had a warrant issued for her arrest, which was then served by the FBI. So, somebody did convince a local magistrate (not a full-blown judge) to issue that warrant.
My take (IANAL)... the judge was not in the wrong for decling to serve the initial warrant. But sending the guy down a private hallway was a dumb move. Was it a federal crime? Doesn't seem like it - a slap on the wrist from her boss probably should have been sufficient.
Really, just more of the Trump administration throwing their weight around and pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable in the US.
I don't know how courts will see it, but it is an interesting legal question that I hope some lawyers run with.
I didn’t know the difference until today when I was reading about the case. I think the difference is the ice warrants are like detention orders and are different than a judge’s arrest warrant that grants a lot more power.
[0] https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/2025/04/23/what-is...
> On or about April 17, 2025, an authorized immigration official found probable cause to believe Flores-Ruiz was removable from the United States and issued a warrant for his arrest. The warrant provided, “YOU ARE COMMANDED to arrest and take into custody for removal proceedings under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the above-named alien [Flores-Ruiz identified on warrant].” Upon his arrest, Flores-Ruiz would be given a Notice of Intent/Decision to Reinstate Prior Order. He would then have an opportunity to contest the determination by making a written or oral statement to an immigration officer.
He'd been deported in 2013 and snuck back in some time later. He was in Milwaukee county court that day because he'd been charged with three counts of domestic battery.
1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...
That's no longer true (in practice),
https://apnews.com/article/irs-ice-immigration-enforcement-t... ("IRS acting commissioner is resigning over deal to send immigrants’ tax data to ICE, AP sources say")
They recently forced their way to into IRS records, so that is no longer true either.
Drug dealing income would be disclosed as "Other income".
If you volunteer "drug dealer" my guess is they could use it against you. Similar to showing up at FBI headquarters and shouting "I'm a drug dealer!"
What else would you put in the Occupation field at the end of the form?
That field isn't actually used for anything other than determining if you are eligible for tax breaks like the school teacher deductable.
Unless "drug dealer" is one of those codes it's not an option to select that so that isn't the correct answer for code.
The instructions for the codes state, "Note that most codes describe more than one type of activity."
If you must provide a description as well you would provide one that describes more than 1 type of activity, not "drug dealer".
* Pharmacies and Drug Retailers: 456110
* Drugs and Druggists' Sundries Merchant Wholesalers: 424210
That doesn't relate to being compelled to attend a proceeding in person where another federal agency can arrest you. If the government can legally arrest you, it does not matter if they determine your location based on another proceeding.
The Supreme Court is going to have to clarify the existence or non-existence of constitutional rights for people living here unlawfully. And then the populace is going to have to make sure that the president doesn't conclude that he can ignore that ruling if he doesn't like it.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/20/tourists-us-residents-detai...
:)
I'm not a lawyer, but... they already have for decades or centuries, and not in the direction that MAGA wants.
> “Yes, without question,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a professor at Yale Law School. “Most of the provisions of the Constitution apply on the basis of personhood and jurisdiction in the United States.”
> Many parts of the Constitution use the term “people” or “person” rather than “citizen.” Rodriguez said those laws apply to everyone physically on U.S. soil, whether or not they are a citizen.
[...]
> In the ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”
Granted, only that last one is actually the Supreme Court. Perhaps there are hundreds of Supreme Court cases testing individual pieces of the constitution, but as the professor said, for the most part they give all the same rights. MAGA has managed to make everyone doubt and argue over it. The party of "Constitution-lovers" flagrantly violating both the plain wording and decades of legal rulings on the Constitution.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-constitutional-ri...
The thing that is unusual is that I have some genuine uncertainty around whether the current Justices will try to give the executive more leeway here than they should, as "compliance in advance" out of concern about their rulings being ignored by this administration.
The constitution is quite clear on this issue and it has been affirmed repeatedly over the last 100+ years by the high courts. Anyone and everyone in the world who is on US soil and subject to US jurisdiction is considered a "US Person". This status is regardless of their nationality/nation of origin, the manner by which they arrived on US soil, or any other circumstance.
As a 'US Person' they are protected by the US Constitution with only minimal exceptions; the right to bear arms[1], ability to run for public office, or vote in federal elections[2]
This is by intent and design and is a necessary cornerstone of US democracy!
This is laid out in - Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 "Aliens in the United States"
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
> The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as persons guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Thus, the Court determined, even one whose presence in this country is unlawful, involuntary, or transitory is entitled to that constitutional protection
[1] Only citizens and permanent residents are allowed unrestricted access to firearms.
[2] Some districts allow pr visa holders to vote in local and state elections
Despite this history, the Court is still going to have to reiterate this.
I don't expect Congress to start getting arrested until or if they ever do any significant pushback against Trump and his cronies.
This is America now, the land of the lawless and unjust. Prepare accordingly people, if they do not like what you are doing they will use their full power to stop you.
Almost no one disagrees with enforcing federal immigration law. The pushback has to do with the illegal manner in which it's happening in reality.
One of the most pernicious memes among the pseudo-intellect crowd is isolating an event from its context and then saying "see, not a problem in isolation!" But these things are not happening in isolation.
With high enough levels of motivated pseudo-intellectual dissection, you can portray a fatal car crash as a series of mundane procedural details and then just say "what bearing does the fatality have on it?"
And by the way, the reason why due process is important is that it's all that stands between you and me and a permanent vacation in El Salvador, if we do or say something that offends the Trumpists sufficiently.
If there is an invasion of millions of people, are you suggesting the federal government would have to merely say that you are one of them in order to pack you and your family into an airplane to a foreign slave camp for the rest of their lives, without even giving you an opportunity to argue that you're not one of those "invaders"?
Give a direct answer please.
If we didn't have that then we'd have a gaping hole for foreign adversaries to exploit. Send their people to do harm, bog down our courts, and our government has no recourse.
Does every enemy combatant get "due process" when they are engaged by US military personnel? No.
Are police officers required to provide "due process" when using their firearm on a dangerous perp? No.
We entrust them with the agency to act accordingly and there are systems for review.
> I trust the government to reasonably determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant.
Your trust is demonstrably misplaced. We already know with 100% certainty that American citizens have been detained beyond the permissible 24hr window without charges. We already know with 100% certainty that completely legal immigrants were deported.
> The courts can determine if that process is reasonable
They have. 9 to 0, SCOTUS said the process is not reasonable.
> I don't think illegal immigrant "invaders" are entitled to due process (especially when they are gang members).
Can you show me this carveout in the 14th or 5th Amendments? (You can't)
> Does every enemy combatant get "due process" when they are engaged by US military personnel? No.
Are US military personnel regularly engaging enemy combatants within US jurisdiction under which the 14th and 5th Amendments apply?
And in any case, even abroad: yes there is a process for legally authorizing specific military engagements.
> Are police officers required to provide "due process" when using their firearm on a dangerous perp? No.
Using your firearm on a dangerous perp is only legal in an immediate defense context, it is not a legal punishment for breaking the law.
If you want to use your firearm on a dangerous perp as legal punishment, then yes, they will get due process first. It's called being "sentenced to death," and is pretty much the most elaborate form of due process we have.
> We entrust them with the agency to act accordingly and there are systems for review.
Funny you say that, because the current administration's argument is quite literally the opposite. Their specific legal argument is that courts do not have any right of judicial review over their deportations.
They won't, or they would have done so already. Granted, I'm not an American so I might be seeing things the wrong way from the other side of the planet, but it has been 3 months already, enough time for Congress to at least be seen as doing something, anything.
It's a sad day in America when people do actually enforce the rules get trapped by other rules.
The people who enforce the rules being bound by the rules is precisely the way it is meant to work. Of course, it remains to be seen if any laws were actually broken.
Generalities help no one here but the oppressors.
edit: maybe he did go out of the back entrance? But the video I have seen of his arrest definitely looks like it was the inside of a courthouse.
That is far from clear. The facts are emerging slowly; so the sequence described below may ultimately be inaccurate… but, ICE agents interrupted a court hearing. The judge presiding over the hearing asked the agents to leave. When they returned, the subject whom the ICE officers were seeking had already left. Is there a law that compels a judge (or anyone, for that matter) to remand someone sought by ICE to their custody? I genuinely don’t know, but were I put in a similar situation I would not hand anyone over to ICE custody given their terrible human rights history. Laws be damned; they and the administration whom they represent are moral failures.
Let's talk about justice, too. Many people believe true justice transcends any particular instantiation of the law at any particular point in time. If so, advocating for the consistent application of all laws can only be truly just if the laws are just.
Look at present circumstances. Reporting has shown that Trump is doing extraordinary rendition: removing people without due process. And not bringing them home after admitting the mistake. Once this reality is factored in, where is the justice in consistently applying a law in order to extrajudicially render a person?
Clearly, the Trump administration has a double standard regarding the rule of law and the role of the judiciary.
Note: this comment surely needs another draft, but I'm running out of time. I welcome all criticism.
P.S. At the risk of surfacing even more complexity, even if a system were to consistently apply one set of criteria, such as ICE's authority to arrest, it is likely that other criteria apply; namely, allocating personnel in a way that best carries out their overall mission. It is my (educated) guess that practical concerns (such as resource limitations) is one of the reasons courts give administrative agencies considerable flexibility in what laws they enforce.
The American voters were never for this, always overwhelmingly against. It’s a non-partisan issue. Only big business and Democratic politicians benefit.
Then, when the new admin tries to remove illegal entrants, suddenly they care a lot about the law. Well, it was illegal for them to come, it’s legal to remove them. Due process only applies to citizens. There’s nothing more legal (and frankly popular with voters) than removing people who are here illegally. To import tens of millions without due process only to turn around and cry about needing it to remove them is the height of hypocrisy and also would be giving them de-facto citizenship, it would take years in court to process each one, where it takes only a couple days to cross the border.
The dumb part about this is the judge sends people to jail ever year for doing exactly this. She knew what he was doing was illegal, she just didn't care.
If you are tempted to downvote, you could make a better point by finding comparable examples under any other modern president.
I didn't say to sell all belongings and move. I said to have a way out if it becomes necessary. The FBI is being weaponized against judges, right now, and this without any modern precedent.
I’m inclined to think that people won’t get travel visas based on the advice of a complete stranger, HN or no.
That is an extremely important distinction. Further, there are legitimate actions by the FBI in the cases of real judges and representatives in their public corruption prosecutions (see Kids for Cash). In this case, though, the charges are intended to intimidate. That is exactly what the director's tweet communicated and why it was deleted.
Oh my god, no, that never happened at all. This is a fever dream. How in the world and constitution Could Biden IMPEACH Trump when he wasn't a member of the House of Reps, which is the body that impeaches Presidents. Actually, Biden also couldn't arrest Trump, as federal arrests would be by the AG. Famously, Merrick Garland took forever to bring cahrges to Trump, and, unlike Trump did with his AGs, Biden never interfered.
Do you have any sources for this "famous" impeachment and arrests?
> I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of so many attempts on the same president.
Because no other President tried to start a violent coup when he lost the election! That is a good reason to arrest someone, which is included in your vague "variety of reasons".
This is exactly what it looks like, nothing else.
ICE is not detaining the judge.
> But Brady McCarron, spokesman for U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., said Dugan is being charged with two federal felony counts: obstruction and concealing an individual. McCarron also confirmed Dugan was arrested at about 8 a.m. at the Milwaukee County Courthouse.
> U.S. Attorney Pam Bondi posted on X: "I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan – a county judge in Milwaukee – for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov."
Source: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/breaking/2025/04/25/milw... (from below)
AFAICT, this is exactly what that would look like. She's been arrested by FBI/US Marshals, and a court date for her hearing has been set.
This is not the charge, fortunately. The charges are listed in the paragraphs I quoted.
For juxtaposition, the "Cash for Children" Judges were issued a summons.
> 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.
So, yeah, sounds like they literally walked into court and interrupted a hearing. Given the average temperament of judges, I think the least immigrant-friendly ones out there would become obstructionists in that situation...
In that case, what the judge did does amount to willful obstruction.
Still doesn’t justify arresting a judge in a court house. This is incredibly close to where taking up arms to secure the republic starts to make sense.
It would, of course. But we don't know what the judge did, and yet everyone here is interpreting the events in the least generous way possible. Next week, when there is another incident, they'll use their least generous interpretations of what happened here as fact to justify their least generous interpretations of that incident.
>If the judge said, “the guy you are looking for is with the chief judge” and it turns out he wasn’t with the chief judge,
Or, if he just said "you all need to leave, none can stay" with the intention of hurrying the proceeding along so that the immigrant could leave before they could possibly return, that too is willful obstruction.
>In that scenario, ICE could have just not gone to see the chief judge until a
The other comment says they were "asked to leave and talk to him for permission". Ask is courtroom code for "do this, or you'll be arrested for contempt and spend at least a few hours in a holding cell in the other part of the courthouse building". There was no "they could have just not gone".
In the fact pattern you've given, we're getting dangerously close to prosecuting a judge for official acts taken in their courtroom. The only difference is that, in your fact pattern, the judge is doing this in bad faith, with the express intent of assisting this person evade arrest.
A Judge is required to maintain order in their courtroom and ensure that the docket runs smoothly. A bunch of ICE agents sitting in the gallery could definitely be interpreted as disruptive. If this defendant saw that or knew that, he would be likely to run. If ICE was going to arrest this person in the middle of a courtroom, that would also be disruptive. A judge is well within their rights to remove people from the gallery if they are going to pose a disruption.
Additionally, this is not new. Defendants walk into court with open warrants all the time. Police are not allowed to walk in and arrest defendants in the middle of court. I don't understand why ICE would be special.
Which, if anyone were honest here, most would admit that they suspect that was the intent. You can't cheer on the judges who do this sort of thing as heroes upholding democracy in one thread, and turn around and in another say "well, they weren't even deliberately doing it, they're just following rules".
Can we prove the judge was acting in bad faith? I don't think that's very likely. But I'd be shocked if that wasn't really what was going on.
We're all being manipulated, you know. I still see 3 headlines a day about the "Maryland man", who isn't from Maryland.
>A bunch of ICE agents sitting in the gallery could definitely be interpreted as disruptive.
Sure, some could claim that. But I doubt they were hooting and hollering and pointing at the man, making intimidating gestures.
>If ICE was going to arrest this person in the middle of a courtroom,
Some here would claim that, but this is unlikely. They'd have waited for the proceeding to end, and followed him out the door. It still accomplishes what they want without pissing off a judge that they might need civility from next week or next year. If you're imagining they're causing trouble that won't help them accomplish what they want to accomplish simple for the sake of causing trouble and making Trump look bad... well, then what can I say?
>Police are not allowed to walk in and arrest defendants in the middle of court.
No one needs to do that. Those same police you're talking about wait until it's over, and arrest them in the hallway outside the courtroom. And they are allowed to do that. But then, most judges don't have soft spot for those criminals like they do for illegal immigrants.
I mean, what’s next? If a judge doesn’t sign off on a warrant because they don’t find probable cause, is that obstructing justice?
As autocracy expands, so does the definition of "poor".
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Wilhoit's Law
unimaginable wealth has entered the chat...
Somebody in particular is above the law, as are all his cronies.