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 has indicted her on two federal felony charges: obstruction and “concealing an individual”.The presence of Ice agents looking to abduct, detain and deport various undocumented people has long been a problem in local courthouses, keeping municipalities from interacting officially with their residents and slowing the pace of court business as undocumented people have become reluctant to show up at courthouse buildings, be it to face criminal charges, as the man in Dugan’s case was doing; to tend to civil matters; or to report crimes or pursue restraining orders against abusers. As a result, many local judges and administrators have criticized Ice’s operation policies, alleging that the agency’s aggressive tactics to enforce federal immigration law have obstructed their own ability to enforce local law. This is a distinct issue from the legality of Trump administration’s immigration crackdown tactics, which have also been challenged by a number of judges at the state and local level. The justice department has reportedly encouraged federal prosecutors to press charges against state and local officials who oppose the administration’s immigration policies.At the Milwaukee courthouse where Dugan works, Ice agents had already made two high-profile arrests of undocumented persons there to conduct official business, actions that sent a chilling effect through the local community. (The defendant in question in Dugan’s court that day was there on a domestic violence charge; because Ice decided to appear there to arrest him on civil immigration charges instead, the proceedings had to be abruptly halted. The victims, who were present in the courtroom, did not get their chance to see justice served.) When she learned of the presence of Ice agents outside her courtroom door, the FBI alleges, Judge Dugan asked the Ice agents to leave, and pointed out that they did not have the correct warrants. She also allegedly called the situation “absurd”.The absurdity was only beginning. After capturing Dugan’s defendant, the Trump administration evidently sought to make an example of Dugan, and concocted the trumped-up felony charges in order to criminalize her objection to their presence in her courthouse. After orchestrating her arrest, the FBI’s embattled chief, Kash Patel, tweeted gloatingly about Dugan’s capture; then, he quickly deleted the post, only to put it up again later. The FBI seems to have procedurally expedited the charges against her, having her indictment issued by a magistrate judge rather than a grand jury, and arresting Dugan rather than giving her the opportunity to turn herself in. They seem to have been going for maximum drama. For her part, Dugan – a well-known progressive in Milwaukee legal circles who spent much of her career working as a public-interest legal aid attorney – said nothing at her arraignment on Friday. Her attorney told the press, “Judge Dugan wholeheartedly rejects and protests her arrest,” adding: “It was not made in the interest of public safety.”Indeed it was not. Instead, Dugan’s arrest was made in the interest of shoring up the Trump administration’s depictions of itself as lawless, fearsome and impervious to constitutional checks on its own power. It was made in the interest of intimidating the administration’s critics and opponents. And it was made in the interest of silencing dissent.The Trump administration has been rapidly accumulating political prisoners. It began with immigrants who voiced opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the graduate students who had their legal status revoked in retaliation for their pro-Palestinian opinions and who were kidnapped by the Ice secret police and shipped off to faraway prisons without process, are political prisoners. Dugan’s, too, is a political prosecution: what is at stake is not so much the law that that meager little comment – “Wait, come with me” – supposedly broke. Instead, it is that Dugan opposes the Trump mass deportation project, and she voiced that opposition in public. Her arrest is an expansion of the Trump regime’s determination into who can be made a political prisoner: with Dugan, that designation extends, in public fashion, to citizens, and even to judges. You should expect that it can expand to you.Dugan’s example is meant to frighten Americans into submission. But I think it might be more likely that she inspires us to subversion. Legality and morality are different things, and what Dugan allegedly did, whether or not it was technically legal, was supremely moral, and not a little bit brave: she refused to cooperate with a secret police force that was there to violate her courtroom, disappear her defendant, and interfere with her own distribution of justice. Doing the morally right thing – opposing Ice and mass deportations with our actions, in practical terms – will require courage from more and more of us, and a greater and greater willingness to face consequences for it.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More
