Trump FBI's first arrest of a judge was "unprecedented." Now it's a pattern.
A sitting Wisconsin judge's arrest on Friday sparked a massive protest — and evoked a first-of-its-kind case from Trump's first term.
Giant protests outside of courthouses are common.
What’s rare, at least in the United States, is for a protest to pop up because a sitting judge has been arrested.
That’s what happened on Friday, after authorities leveled two federal charges against Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, accusing her of helping an immigrant evade arrest. Hundreds went to federal court in her support, and footage of their demonstration went viral on social media.
The reason for the outrage
Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig put the sitting judge’s arrest in the context of Trump’s broader attack on the U.S. judiciary.
During Trump’s first term in 2019, the Justice Department filed a different immigration-related obstruction case against a sitting judge: Massachusetts state District Court Judge Shelley Joseph, whose prosecution a federal appeals court described as “apparently unprecedented.”
What made the case unique wasn’t the judge’s job but the justification for the arrest: No state judge had ever been prosecuted for not facilitating the federal government’s immigration policies, Joseph’s legal team noted.
Two is a pattern for Trump, and there are other parallels between the judges’ cases.
The judges presided over cases where the defendants were accused of serious crimes, but immigration authorities did not have a judge-signed warrant, only an administrative warrant. That’s important because the Milwaukee Police Department apparently does not participate in immigration arrests without a judicial warrant.
As the publication Urban Milwaukee first reported, the police department’s 2023 guidance instructs: “An administrative warrant is not a criminal warrant signed by a judge, and it shall not be used by any department members as the basis to detain or arrest a person.”
“Fear in the Community”
Legal analyst Mary McCord, a former Acting Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department, explained why judges are wary about immigration enforcement around their courtrooms.
“They don't want to do anything that would create fear in the community about showing up in court, whether you’re a victim, a witness, or if one of your family members might be undocumented,” McCord said in a phone interview.
Former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner called Dugan’s case a “travesty,” noting that court papers do not even accuse her of whisking the immigrant to a private area to avoid detection.
“The judge stands accused of letting the defendant out of a door that led to a public hallway, where the judge knew law enforcement was,” Epner said in a phone interview.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Attorney General Pamela Bondi went on Fox to insult judges like Dugan as “deranged,” and FBI director Kash Patel posted a statement on social media bashing her well before any trial.
For Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, all this adds up to an “intimidation campaign” by Trump’s Justice Department.
“I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin, but amplifying this arrest as the Attorney General and FBI Director have done looks like part of a larger intimidation campaign against judges,” Whitehouse said in a statement. “We are seeing it in orchestrated threats against federal judges and their families, and baseless impeachment filings. Trump is constantly challenging the power of the other two coequal branches of government in his attempts to subvert the Constitution, whose principles have for over two centuries kept Americans safe and made America great. We are honor-bound to defend those principles.”
Possible Action Item: Just showing up
The hundreds of people who went to a Milwaukee courthouse to protest a judge’s arrest made sure that the public outcry became a part of the story in the Washington Post and elsewhere. Imagine if no one showed up.
Going to the courthouse is your right, and it has an impact.
If you don’t live near Wisconsin, find a case you care about near you and witness history.
Chief Justice Roberts...come get your boy.
The Trump administration policies are like the game Whack-a-Mole. Just when you see a precedent broken, they come up with another . Very interesting that Kash Patel deleted his tweet. My dream is that the Democrats get the majority in the Senate in 2028 and Senator Whitehouse becomes chair of the Judiciary Committee!