Arresting Judges, Ambushing Immigrants

When loyalty to law becomes liability—and the trapdoor swings open beneath our feet.

Illustration (Donny Evans)

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The arrest of a sitting judge by federal agents is not merely an institutional scandal—it is a dismantling of constitutional order.

On April 25, Judge Hannah Dugan of Milwaukee County was seized by the FBI in her own courthouse, fingerprinted, and charged with two federal felonies for what prosecutors allege was the crime of guiding a man through a side exit.

The man in question, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, had appeared for a misdemeanor domestic battery hearing—no felony, no ongoing threat—and was the subject of an immigration detainer, not a criminal warrant.

ICE agents were waiting outside the courtroom, and Dugan, according to federal authorities, chose to let the law proceed rather than subordinate her court to the demands of federal immigration enforcement.

For that act—of discretion, not defiance—she now stands accused of obstruction and harboring, as if fidelity to the Constitution were a form of sedition.

A nation that prosecutes its judges for respecting constitutional limits has already revealed the kind of government it wishes to become. It has simply not admitted it yet.

On the morning of her arrest, Judge Dugan was taken into custody by the FBI on courthouse grounds in Milwaukee. She appeared briefly in federal court that afternoon before being released. Her next court appearance is scheduled for May 15.

According to the affidavit filed by federal authorities, she is accused of escorting Flores-Ruiz and his attorney through the courtroom’s jury door to prevent his detention. Her defense was immediate and unequivocal.

“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” said her attorney during the hearing.

What prosecutors have called “obstruction” is more accurately described as a refusal to perform a fiction.

ICE had issued an administrative detainer—civil in nature, unsigned by any judge—requesting local cooperation in apprehending Flores-Ruiz. Under the Fourth Amendment, only judicial warrants confer the power to arrest.

Administrative detainers are requests, not commands. Supreme Court precedent in Printz v. United States forbids the federal government from conscripting state officers into federal service, and the Third Circuit's ruling in Galarza v. Szalczyk affirms that compliance with ICE detainers is strictly voluntary.

In other words, Judge Dugan was upholding constitutional law by declining to turn her courtroom into an instrument of executive enforcement. Her courtroom was not a staging ground for federal power; it was a fortified boundary between the judiciary and the executive branch.

That distinction—between legal judgment and political compliance—is not merely inconvenient to this administration; it is intolerable. And that is what her arrest was meant to signal.

The arrest of Judge Dugan is not an aberration—it is the predictable outcome of a federal policy architecture that treats civil procedure as a mechanism for surveillance and control. What was once a framework for resolving disputes is now being retooled as an instrument of state coercion.

Across the country, immigrants who voluntarily appear for green card interviews or citizenship appointments are met not by caseworkers, but by immigration agents waiting in adjacent hallways, equipped not to process applications but to make arrests. In states like Rhode Island and Vermont, and in cities like Kansas City, Missouri, families are separated inside federal buildings intended for integration, not removal—a reversal of purpose that betrays the institutions themselves.

Immigrants who comply with legal proceedings are arrested before their eligibility can be adjudicated—their applications weaponized against them.

A mother arrives for a green card interview with two children at her side. She leaves in handcuffs; they leave with strangers. This is not law enforcement—it is procedural entrapment. The invitation to regularize one’s status becomes the bait for an administrative ambush.

This is not process as protection; it is process as punishment. A government that once pledged to uphold the rule of law now uses it as an instrument of capture.

When legal institutions become traps, the structural integrity of the republic begins to fail. A courthouse should serve as a crucible of impartiality; a citizenship office, as a gateway to belonging. But when the state converts these spaces into arenas of ambush, it does more than betray individual trust—it undermines the conditions for public trust itself.

No tyranny announces itself at the beginning; it metastasizes through the slow erosion of public expectations and the silent betrayal of those who once believed the law could protect them. In this model of governance, legality is not a shield—it is bait, designed to draw the vulnerable into the open before the trap is sprung.

The immigrant is no longer treated as a petitioner but as a prop in the state’s morality play—one in which obedience is punished and cruelty rehearsed until it hardens into policy. These tactics do not merely harm the individuals caught within them; they erode the very concept of citizenship itself.

The government attempts to justify these arrests under the thinnest pretense of legality, relying on civil immigration detainers that masquerade as warrants. But an administrative warrant is not a judicial order; it carries no constitutional authority and is signed not by a neutral magistrate, but by the very agency seeking to execute it.

When ICE coordinates with USCIS to schedule interviews, only to detain applicants in the middle of the process, it circumvents not just the courts but the Constitution itself. Decisions like Printz—which prohibits the federal government from conscripting state officials—and Galarza—which affirms that local compliance with ICE detainers is voluntary—are not arcane footnotes; they are structural safeguards, designed specifically to prevent the fusion of state institutions with federal enforcement.

When a judge is prosecuted for respecting constitutional limits, and immigrants are arrested for engaging legal process, the law is no longer being enforced—it is being impersonated.

What we are witnessing is not chaos but choreography—a system in which cruelty is not incidental to policy, but integral to it.

These are not bureaucratic misfires or signs of institutional overload; they are deliberate performances of control, executed through forms, schedules, and scripts. The courtroom becomes a stage. The appointment, a setup. The immigrant, a target in a ritualized display of state authority.

It wears a name tag.

It files a form.

And it disappears a family without ever raising its voice.

There is a grim efficiency to it: the state has weaponized procedure, turning the appearance of due process into a mechanism of control. A green card interview becomes a pretext for detention; a courtroom becomes the site of a judge’s criminalization. Each ambush inside a legal institution is an act of bureaucratic self-destruction. It is cruelty executed through formalism—precisely because it feels orderly, it becomes harder to confront.

And like all great performances of tyranny, it relies not on guns or orders—but on the illusion that this is how things are supposed to work.

A government that prosecutes its judges for honoring constitutional boundaries, and detains immigrants for participating in legal process, is not enforcing the law—it is dismantling it.

What remains is ritual without substance: institutions that still resemble justice in form but operate in service of fear. The arrest of Judge Dugan and the orchestrated ambushes at USCIS offices are not anomalies; they are indicators of a system redesigned not to adjudicate, but to ensnare. In such a regime, the law becomes a veneer—citizenship, a test of endurance.

This is not the rule of law. It is administrative tyranny, executed with paperwork and protocol.

And if there is anything left of the republic, it lies in how fiercely we resist the temptation to call this tyranny anything but its name.