MILWAUKEE — Federal prosecutors on Monday alleged a Wisconsin judge helped a Mexican man briefly elude immigration officials in April and that just before she directed him through the back door of her courtroom, she said that she would “get the heat” for it.
An attorney for Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan disputed prosecutors’ characterization of her actions and contended the judge was trying to follow draft court rules about how to handle immigration arrests at the courthouse. Dugan faces up to six years in prison if convicted on two counts.
The extraordinary trial, which is expected to last a week, is the latest test of the Justice Department’s crackdown on anyone whom it sees as putting up barriers to President Donald Trump’s agenda. In the months since Dugan was charged, the department has pursued indictments against several Trump critics, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). Courts have dismissed the charges against Comey and James, but the department has tried to revive them.
A grand jury indicted Dugan in May, accusing her of obstructing an official proceeding and concealing a person from arrest over her handling of federal agents’ plan to apprehend Eduardo Flores Ruiz outside her courtroom. Flores Ruiz was charged with misdemeanor battery, and Dugan was preparing to conduct a hearing in his case when agents arrived outside her courtroom. She sent the agents down the hall to the office of the county’s chief judge and, while most of the agents were away, postponed the hearing and directed Flores Ruiz and his attorney out a back door in her courtroom that is typically used by staff and jurors.
That door goes to a short, private hallway that leads to two doors — one that empties into a stairway and one that leads to the public hallway where the federal agents had been waiting. Flores Ruiz and his attorney exited through the door that goes into the public hallway and walked to an elevator. An agent rode in the elevator with them, and soon afterward met with other agents, confronted Flores Ruiz outside the courthouse, chased him and arrested him, according to prosecutors and video shown during opening statements.
Flores Ruiz later pleaded guilty to illegally entering the United States after previously having been removed from the United States in 2013. He was deported in November.
The significance of using the back door is expected to figure prominently in the trial. Prosecutors allege it gave Flores Ruiz a chance to try to avoid arrest, and Dugan’s attorneys argue it did little for him because he wound up in the same hall as the agents.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Keith Alexander played audio of Dugan asking her court reporter if Flores Ruiz and his attorney could go down the stairs. When the court reporter asked if she should show them, Dugan said, “I’ll do it. I’ll get the heat.”
Alexander argued Dugan knew what she was doing was wrong, telling jurors she later told a colleague she was in trouble with the chief judge because she “tried to help that guy down the hallway.”
“The judicial robe … does not put her above the law,” Alexander told the jurors.
Steven Biskupic, an attorney for Dugan, told jurors that Dugan directed Flores Ruiz and his attorney to go straight down the private hall and pointed toward the door that went into the public hallway, not the door leading to the stairs. They emerged in the public hallway less than 12 feet from where they would have been if they had gone out the courtroom’s front door, he noted.
“Eleven feet, 10 inches — that’s what she’s on trial for,” Biskupic said.
He told jurors Dugan was trying to follow courthouse rules on where immigration arrests could take place and was not attempting to interfere with Flores Ruiz’s apprehension. Dugan was “struggling to follow the chief judge’s policy” on arrests at the courthouse, he said.
Federal officials have put a spotlight on the case. FBI Director Kash Patel announced her April arrest on social media and later that day posted a photo of her being led away in handcuffs. Attorney General Pam Bondi accused Dugan of “protecting a criminal defendant over victims of crime.”
Dugan’s arrest has echoes of a case during Trump’s first term, when the Justice Department in 2018 charged a judge in Massachusetts with helping an undocumented immigrant escape from a courthouse. Those charges were dropped in 2022 under an agreement that required the judge to report herself to the state’s judicial discipline commission.
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