The accused scofflaw judge that the left has adopted as its latest martyr — a modern-day Harriet Tubman, even — is now a federally-indicted judge facing up to six years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines on charges she helped an allegedly violent illegal immigrant evade federal officials.
A federal grand jury this week handed down a two-page indictment accusing Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan of knowingly concealing an illegal alien from arrest and obstructing federal law enforcement proceedings.
The Milwaukee grand jury did not seem to view the liberal activist judge as a 21st century Harriet Tubman.
FBI agents arrested Dugan on April 25, a week after prosecutors say Dugan angrily confronted federal law enforcement officials and allegedly helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz briefly escape arrest via an exit not accessible to the general public. Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national who had previously been deported, was in court and scheduled to appear before Dugan to face charges of battering two people at a Milwaukee residence, according to the criminal complaint.
The judge is scheduled to appear in federal court on Thursday to enter a plea.
The Federalist could not reach Dugan for comment. One of her attorneys, Craig Mastantuono, said in a statement that the judge “asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court.”’
‘No Ordinary Criminal Case’
Dugan’s high-priced legal team moved on Wednesday to have the federal charges against her tossed out, according to the leftist Wisconsin Examiner.
“This is no ordinary criminal case, and Dugan is no ordinary criminal defendant,” states the motion to dismiss, obtained by the publication. “Dugan is a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge. She was arrested and indicted for actions allegedly taken in and in the immediate vicinity of her courtroom, involving a person appearing before her as a party.”
As expected, Dugan’s legal team is arguing federal law enforcement had no authority to arrest a Milwaukee County judge engaged in her official duties, protected under the “Tenth Amendment and fundamental principles of federalism and comity reflected in that amendment and in the very structure of the United States Constitution.”
As the Trump-hating left likes to say, however, “no one is above the law.” Federal prosecutors say the judge put herself above the law when she allegedly directed the wanted illegal alien and his attorney out the back door, which resulted in a foot chase to apprehend a man accused of violent acts who may have thought he had nothing to lose.
On the day of Dugan’s arrest, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in an X post that the judge “intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse …”
“Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public,” Patel wrote.
According to the criminal complaint, Dugan was “visibly angry” with a “confrontational, angry demeanor” when U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents showed up to arrest Flores-Ruiz.
Dugan demanded the federal officials meet with Milwaukee County’s chief justice down the hall from the courtroom, the federal complaint alleges. While much of the team was preoccupied, Dugan escorted Flores-Ruiz and his legal counsel out of the courtroom through the “jury door,” which leads to a non-public area of the courthouse, the complaint asserts. The judge had briskly adjourned the illegal immigrant’s battery case, according to the state prosecutor working the case on behalf of the state. Dugan did so, the attorney told federal officials, even though Flores-Ruiz’s “victims were present in the courtroom.”
False Equivalencies
For allegedly interfering in the enforcement of the law, the radicals are painting the Milwaukee County judge as a civil-rights hero — absurdly on the scale of Harriet Tubman, the slave who escaped to freedom to become an abolition movement giant and conductor of the Underground Railroad.
A trio of leftists, including Madison-based lawfare practitioner Jeffrey Mandell, ludicrously opined in the sympathetic Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Dugan’s cause and her troubles with federal authorities are similar to a famous Wisconsin Fugitive Slave case in antebellum America. The case of Joshua Glover is powerful. The runaway slave escaped a Missouri plantation in 1854 en route to freedom in the north. Federal marshals arrived in Racine to arrest Glover under the hideous Fugitive Slave “compromise” law.
Sherman Booth, an abolitionist newspaper editor, fired up a crowd outside a Milwaukee jail where Glover was being detained. The crowd stormed the jail and helped Glover escape to Canada where he lived the rest of his life as a free man. It’s one of several inspiring stories from the abolitionist movement in the years leading up to the Civil War.
But Dugan isn’t Booth, and Flores-Ruiz is no Joshua Glover. The illegal immigrant wasn’t born a slave. He didn’t escape human bondage. He left Mexico several years ago and entered the United States illegally. Federal law enforcement caught him breaking immigration laws and a judge agreed he should be deported. He was. He came back. And, recently, he was charged with badly beating two people in the Milwaukee home where he was said to live. The due process that Mandell and his leftist pals assert for a previously-deported illegal immigrant under the rule of immigration law doesn’t square with the natural, self-evident rights of man. Like most arguments on the left, the audacious Fugitive Slave Act comparison collapses in an acid bath of false equivalencies.
It should be noted that Mandell runs the leftist lawfare firm Law Forward that has pushed a phony “fake electors” lawsuit and cheered on a politically driven prosecution of President Trump’s allies. Among its targets is respected attorney and former Wisconsin judge Jim Troupis, who has had his due process and other rights obliterated because he vigorously represented the Trump campaign in Wisconsin following the hotly contested 2020 presenting campaign.
‘Send a Signal’
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said the allegations against Dugan appear to be pretty well-founded. They certainly were for the grand jury. In deep blue Milwaukee County, the Republican senator said he can see a lot of jury members and judges “sympathetic to a radical left judge who was obstructing justice.”
If Dugan is guilty of the charges against her, Johnson said the judge “ought to have the book thrown at her” for two reasons.
“To punish crime, and she should be punished for her crime, and also to deter crimes,” he told me last week on the Vicki McKenna Show. “And I think you need to, hopefully, send a signal to the rest of the judiciary, other offices fo the court: You have to cooperate with ICE as we legally deport some of these millions of people that got let into this country, they got welcomed in completely unvetted. Now they expect citizen-like due process rights for every illegal immigrant that came to this country. It is such a mismatch in terms of the problems that President Trump has to clean up.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
