On Friday, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its assault on the courts when the FBI arrested Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge handling misdemeanors in Milwaukee – allegedly for helping an undocumented man avoid abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside her courtroom. The arrest, a highly publicized and dramatic move from the Trump administration, seemed designed to elicit fear among judges, government bureaucrats and ordinary Americans that any effort to slow, impede or merely not facilitate the administration’s mass kidnapping and deportation efforts will lead to swift, forceful and disproportionate punishment by Donald Trump allies. Her arrest may be the opening salvo of a broader Trump assault on judges.
Even if you believe the FBI’s allegations, their account of Dugan’s alleged misconduct is trivial and flimsy, wholly undeserving of the administration’s sadistically disproportionate response. The FBI claims that earlier this month, on 17 April, when an undocumented man was in Dugan’s Milwaukee courtroom charged with misdemeanor battery, she learned that Ice agents were waiting in a public hallway to arrest him. Later, in her courtroom, when she saw the defendant moving toward a main exit, she told the man, “Wait, come with me,” and directed him towards a side door instead. (He was captured by Ice shortly thereafter.) The FBI arrested her in her courtroom and she has been charged with two federal felonies: obstruction and “concealing an individual”.
