The FBI arrested a county judge in Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration enforcement, FBI director Kash Patel said on Friday. However, she has since been released.
In a post that has since been deleted from X, Patel said Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested because she “intentionally misdirected federal agents” away from taking an “illegal alien” from Mexico into custody. The man, 30-year-old Eduardo Flores Ruiz, who has been accused of misdemeanor battery, was able to “evade arrest,” according to Patel, because of Dugan helping him get away from ICE agents who came to arrest him at a court hearing last week.
“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her lawyer Craig Mastantuono said at a later hearing on Friday. Dugan was then released from custody and now has a court date set for May 15.
Local reports have offered different stories on whether Dugan helped Ruiz hide in a jury deliberation room or escape the courthouse on Apr. 18, when ICE agents came to arrest him.
“Sources say Dugan didn’t hide the defendant and his attorney in a jury deliberation room, as other media have said,” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Thursday. “Rather, sources said, when ICE officials left to talk with the chief judge on the same floor, Dugan took the pair to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor.”
Eventually, Ruiz was “chased down” on foot by agents after the judge initially helped him elude ICE, Patel said in his X post. “But the judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”
The arrest of Judge Dugan comes as the Trump administration has increasingly butted heads with courts on its push to deport illegal immigrants.
Brady McCarron, a U.S. Marshals spokesman, confirmed to The New York Times that the judge had been arrested by F.B.I. agents on Friday morning. The charging documents were not immediately available.
