MILWAUKEE — Prosecutors on Thursday tried to convince a jury that a Wisconsin judge put her personal beliefs above the law and helped a Mexican immigrant seeking to arrest him in the courthouse.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan did not take the stand in her own defense as she faces obstruction and concealment charges. The case was expected to head to the jury late Thursday following closing arguments.
“You don’t have to agree with immigration enforcement policy to see this was wrong,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Brown Watzka told the jury in closing arguments. “You just have to agree the law applies equally to everyone.”
The highly unusual charges against a sitting judge are an extraordinary consequence of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Dugan’s supporters say Trump is looking to make an example of her to blunt judicial opposition to immigration arrests.
Prosecutors have tried to show that Dugan intentionally interfered with members of a federal immigration task force’s efforts to arrest 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz at the Milwaukee County Courthouse.
Brown Watzka told the jury that Dugan provided Flores-Ruiz with an escape route.
“A judge does not have absolute authority to do whatever she wants whenever she puts on her robe,” Brown Watzka said. “The defendant is not on trial for her views on immigration policy. She is on trial because she made a series of deliberate decisions to step outside the law in order to help an individual evade federal arrest.”
Brown Watzka pointed out that Dugan had a whispered discussion with her court reporter about which of them should guide Flores-Ruiz out the private door and down a back staircase out of the arrest team’s sight.
Flores-Ruiz ultimately did not take the stairs and instead went through the private door into the public hallway, but Brown Watzka said that means nothing.
“The only thing that matters is the defendant’s intent,” she said. “The stairs discussion proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intended to prevent the arrest.”
Dugan’s attorneys called four witnesses Thursday, including a public defender who took photographs of the arrest team in the hallway and two judges who testified that a draft policy about how to handle immigration arrests was in flux in the weeks before Flores-Ruiz’s arrest.
Former Milwaukee mayor and Democratic congressman testified that he’s known Dugan since high school and described her as “extremely honest.”
Officers who came to arrest Flores-Ruiz on April 18 testified that they learned he was in the country illegally after he was arrested in Milwaukee on state battery charges. They testified that Dugan and another judge, Kristela Cervera, stepped into the hallway wearing their robes. Dugan angrily told four members of the team to report to the chief judge’s office, the officers testified.
As Cervera led them to the office, Dugan returned to her courtroom and led Flores-Ruiz out a private door into the hallway. Prosecutors produced transcripts of audio recordings from microphones in her courtroom that show Dugan told her court reporter that for showing Flores-Ruiz out the private door.
Two agents Dugan missed during her confrontations with the team followed Flores-Ruiz outside, and a foot chase through traffic ensued before he was finally arrested. Members of the team testified that Dugan divided them and forced them out of position, leaving them too short-handed to make a safe arrest in the hallway.
Dugan’s attorneys argued that the arrest team could have apprehended Flores-Ruiz at any point after he emerged from the courtroom and Dugan shouldn’t be blamed for their decision to wait until he got outside.
The case is a “shot across the bow” to state judges everywhere meant to intimidate them, said Howard Schweber, a political scientist and affiliate faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“It is unthinkable that this prosecution would have been brought in a prior administration,” Schweber said. “This is truly extraordinary, I would even say unprecedented certainly in my adult lifetime. I have never seen anything like it. And professionally its quite shocking.”
