Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!
-- from A Man For All Seasons, written by Robert Bolt
trump's thugs are arresting judges now (via Alanna Durkin Richer, Devi Shastri, and Scott Bauer at AP News):
Protesters chanted and marched Saturday outside the FBI after agents arrested a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities. The case has escalated a clash between the Trump administration and local authorities over the Republican president’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
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.
President Donald Trump’s administration has accused state and local officials of interfering with his immigration enforcement priorities. The arrest also comes amid a growing battle between the administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters...
Court papers suggest Dugan was alerted to the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the courthouse by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that they appeared to be in the hallway.
The FBI affidavit describes Dugan as “visibly angry” over the arrival of immigration agents in the courthouse and says that she pronounced the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. It says she and another judge later approached members of the arrest team inside the courthouse, displaying what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor.”
After a back-and-forth with officers over the warrant for the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, she demanded that the arrest team speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, the affidavit says.
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.”
A sign that remained posted on Dugan’s courtroom door Friday advised that if any attorney or other court official “knows or believes that a person feels unsafe coming to the courthouse to courtroom 615,” they should notify the clerk and request an appearance via Zoom.
I may not be a lawyer or an expert on law, but from what I do know - my exposure as a journalism student and research librarian - is that judges don't like law enforcement entering their courtrooms threatening to arrest people there. There is an expectation - sort of like treating the spaces as holy ground - that people required to appear before their benches be protected if only in that moment from further police harassment of any kind.
It's become a popular trap for ICE agents, appearing at courthouses to "arrest" the migrants going through the established process to be in the U.S., who are required by the laws to show up regularly for hearings tracking their approval. trump's thugs want to scare these perfectly normal people - some who have broken no laws - into staying away from the courthouses - which is why judges want courts to be safe places - so that the agents can officially claim them breaking the rules and justify arresting them in the first place. It's a sadistic Catch-22 that shouldn't even be happening.
Marcy Wheeler has her thoughts on the matter:
After Judge Dugan interacted with the arresting officers and, upon learning that they only had an administrative warrant and after telling them they needed a judicial warrant, she directed them to go meet with the Chief Judge (who wasn’t at the courthouse, but who spoke with the ICE officer on the phone). Then, Judge Dugan apparently adjourned Flores-Ruiz’ scheduled hearing and directed him and his attorney to leave via the jury door...
Flores-Ruiz appears to have gone, via back hallways, to the same sixth floor public hallway via which he had entered the court room. According the complaint, both DEA officers saw Flores-Ruiz in the public hallway before he entered the elevator...
Rather than arresting Flores-Ruiz, whom the officers knew was unarmed, there on the sixth floor, one of them rode down the elevator with him and his attorney and the other alerted the other officers. Four of them convened outside of the courthouse and chased him down the street and arrested him, just 22 minutes after he entered Judge Dugan’s courtroom at 8:43.
If the ICE agents were still able to track and arrest Flores-Ruiz, how the hell does that justify obstruction charges? And Dugan pointed out the agents had an administrative warrant, which doesn't really establish the authority to arrest somebody.
In a criminal complaint, the government charged Judge Dugan with 18 USC 1505, obstruction of a proceeding, and 18 USC 1071, concealing a person from arrest. [docket] The FBI arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse on Friday amid a deliberate media frenzy, up to and including the FBI Director posting a picture of Judge Dugan’s arrest in violation of DOJ guidelines designed to prevent prejudice...
Both Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller also made comments that arguably violate rules prohibiting comments that prejudice a proceeding (remember that Judge Dale Ho already found that Pam Bondi’s public comments about the Eric Adams case likely violated local rules)...
For obstruction, it will be contested whether an immigration removal counts as an investigative proceeding. For concealment, it will be contested whether the administrative warrant qualifies, and whether directing Flores-Ruiz via a back hallway to the very same public hallway where the officers had planned to arrest him and had a chance to arrest him amounts to concealment.
Both charges will pivot on Judge Dugan’s intent: whether she had corrupt intent and the intent of helping him evade arrest entirely, or whether she wanted to protect the sanctity of her own courtroom.
Key to her intent is her belief, which she made clear to the officers, that they needed a judicial warrant...
It may also matter that, by description, she didn’t actually look at the administrative warrant, because it might matter if she knew whether Flores-Ruiz had been deported before. In a report published before the arrest, Dugan is quoted as stating that “a warrant was not presented in the hallway on the 6th floor,” and by description, she was not shown one.
Thus far, the complaint seems to want to suggest that Dugan had corrupt intent because she was angry...
But judges get angry for lots of reasons, including that someone showed up outside her courtroom to surprise someone with business in it.
Wheeler's key point:
The arrest has rightly been viewed as an attempt, at a time when Trump and his minions are already making wildly inappropriate attacks on judges, to bully the judiciary.
trump and his lackeys have been getting a lot of pushback from the federal judges over their violations of due process and established norms. So here's the bullies, finding excuses to arrest judges and put the fear of their executive abuses onto the entire third branch of our Constitutional government.
trump despises the legal system, mocks it with every criminal and civil violation all because he'd abused that system for decades, and he now has a Supreme Court in his pocket that will excuse away every sin he's committing now.
Our most basic rights established by the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, are all under attack. trump and his racist anti-immigrant allies may be attacking only the "dread Others" for now, but they are doing so by shredding due process, the writ of Habeas Corpus, every protection of the Rule of Law set up over centuries of British and American legal rulings that serve ALL AMERICANS to this day.
The second those "Others" - who are human, they are us in spite of the fears that the racists spread - lose legal protections under the Rule of Law, we - the rest of the nation - can and will lose those protections as well.
These judges are fighting to uphold the Rule of Law, defending the centuries of precedence and norms and case history.
And trump will throw every one of those judges into jail.
Update: looks like a late-day sharing at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up from Steve in Manhattan. Thank you, Steve!
1 comment:
Marcy Wheeler also compared this case to another one during Fergus' first term, where the judge appeared to have actually tried to shield the defendant from ICE and was eventually dismissed, even though stronger on the merits than this one.
This was another staged stunt designed to impress the MAGAs and intimidate the judiciary. So far the MAGAs are probably impressed, but the judiciary isn't having it.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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