A courtroom and a judge's gavel. (Getty Images creative)
The Milwaukee County judge accused of helping a man evade arrest by federal immigration authorities this spring is set to go to trial in December.
Judge Hannah Dugan, who has been charged with federal felony and misdemeanor counts, said on Wednesday she would not appeal a U.S. District Court judge’s decision not to dismiss the case against her — though she reserved the right to appeal later. On Wednesday, federal Judge Lynn Adelman scheduled Dugan’s trial to begin Dec. 15.
Dugan’s case has become a national example of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on officials in other branches of government at the local, state and federal levels who are perceived as working against Trump’s aggressive immigration policies. Her April arrest drew widespread condemnation as a threat to judicial independence and criticism of federal Department of Justice officials for publicizing the case before she was even indicted.
The case stems from what federal prosecutors allege was a deliberate attempt to conceal Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant, from federal authorities. Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom for an appearance in a misdemeanor battery case against him when federal agents arrived with an administrative warrant — which only allowed the agents to operate in the public areas of the Milwaukee County courthouse, not within Dugan’s courtroom.
Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the courtroom, which led them to the same hallway where the agents were standing but not directly past them. An agent rode down in the elevator with Flores-Ruiz and he was later arrested on the street.
Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A federal judge on Tuesday denied a motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in the immigration enforcement-related case that has drawn national attention as an example of the Trump Administration’s effort to punish judges it sees as antagonistic to its increased deportation efforts.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman issued a 27-page order denying Dugan’s motion. Dugan’s attorneys had filed to dismiss the case earlier this summer, arguing that the prosecution violated judicial immunity and represented extreme federal overreach into the operations of the state court system.
Dugan was arrested in April after federal prosecutors alleged she had acted to conceal a man without legal authorization to be in the U.S. from federal agents. The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was in Dugan’s courtroom to appear for a hearing on a misdemeanor battery charge against him when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI came to the courtroom to arrest him. The agents were in possession of an administrative warrant signed by an ICE official, rather than a judicial warrant granted by a federal judge.
The administrative warrant did not give the agents the authority to enter private spaces in the courthouse.
Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the courtroom, which led them to the same hallway where the agents were standing but not directly past them. An agent rode down in the elevator with Flores-Ruiz and he was later arrested on the street. Dugan has been charged with a felony and a misdemeanor for allegedly trying to help Flores-Ruiz evade arrest.
Adelman’s decision Tuesday is an important step toward Dugan’s case moving to a trial. In his order, he cited the report of U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph several times. Joseph had recommended that the motion to dismiss not be granted.
“There is no basis for granting immunity simply because some of the allegations in the indictment describe conduct that could be considered ‘part of a judge’s job,’” Adelman wrote. “As the magistrate judge noted, the same is true in the bribery prosecutions, concededly valid, where the judges were prosecuted for performing official acts intertwined with bribery.”
Adelman gave Dugan’s attorneys until Sept. 3 to appeal his order. If the order is appealed, Dugan’s trial likely wouldn’t occur until 2026. However if there isn’t an appeal, a trial could take place much sooner.
The Milwaukee County Courthouse (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin Republicans are proposing a bill to stop paying judges who have been suspended in response to the arrest and suspension of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan.
Dugan was indicted in May by a federal grand jury and has pleaded not guilty to charges that she impeded the arrest by federal agents of an immigrant who was appearing in her court room. She was arrested by FBI agents in April.
The bill, cosponsored by Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee), Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August (R-Walworth) and Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers), would require that if the state Supreme Court imposes a suspension as proceedings are pending or as a disciplinary sanction due to misconduct, it must be without pay.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court chose to suspend Dugan in April, saying it was in the public interest to relieve her of her duties for now. Dugan is still being paid her nearly $175,000 annual salary.
The lawmakers noted that Dugan’s trial was postponed from July 21 and may not take place until 2026. They said taxpayers will be paying for “an extended vacation” even as reserve judges have to fill in for her and they argued the bill is needed to stop suspended judges from getting paid in the future.
According to the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, 15 judges have been suspended by the Supreme Court from 1978 to 2024.
“In these rare circumstances, these judges’ actions and alleged misconduct rose to such a level that suspension was warranted,” the lawmakers said in a memo. “Simply put, Wisconsin taxpayers must be protected from the misconduct and/or commission of a crime by rogue judges.”
Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A federal magistrate judge recommended on Monday that the criminal case against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan proceed. Dugan has been indicted on charges that she helped an immigrant without legal status who came to her courtroom for a hearing on a misdemeanor charge evade federal immigration authorities.
Dugan was arrested in April and indicted in May. She’s pleaded not guilty to charges of concealing an individual to prevent arrest and obstruction.
The case has become an example of the Trump administration’s effort to punish judicial interference with its escalation of immigration enforcement. In April, 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom when federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI arrived at the Milwaukee County Courthouse to arrest him.
Prosecutors say Dugan helped Flores-Ruiz out a side doorway to avoid arrest but the doorway Dugan led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney use led to the same hallway in which the agents were waiting and one took the elevator down with them. Flores-Ruiz was arrested on the street outside.
In May, Dugan had filed a motion to dismiss the charges against her, arguing she is immune from prosecution because she was acting in her official capacity as a judge and that the arrest violated Wisconsin’s sovereignty as a state by disrupting a state court hearing and prosecuting a state judge.
On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph recommended that the motion to dismiss be denied. The final decision on dismissal is up to U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, who does not need to follow Joseph’s recommendation.
“We are disappointed in the magistrate judge’s non-binding recommendation, and we will appeal it,” Dugan attorney Steven Biskupic, a former federal prosecutor, said in a statement. “This is only one step in what we expect will be a long journey to preserve the independence and integrity of our courts.”
In her recommendation, Joseph wrote that judicial immunity applies when a judge is being sued for civil damages, not criminal charges.
“A judge’s actions, even when done in her official capacity, does not bar criminal prosecution if the actions were done in violation of the criminal law,” she wrote.
A growing memorial for Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband stands Monday, June 16, 2025 at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
The horrific assassination of Minnesota’s Democratic legislative leader Melissa Hortman last weekend left people across the country in a state of shock and grief.
Derrick Van Orden held a press conference Sept. 9 to discuss crimes committed in his hometown by a Venezuelan immigrant. | (Screenshot via Zoom)
But just across the border from Hortman’s home state, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden seized on the double murder of Hortman and her husband, Mark, who were shot dead in their home, and the near-fatal shootings of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, to mock Democrats and try to score political points. Van Orden falsely characterized the suspected shooter, a right-wing religious fanatic on a mission to murder Democrats and abortion providers, as an anti-Trump protester who “decided to murder and attempt to murder some politicians that were not far Left enough for them.”
This wildly misleading analysis came straight out of the MAGA alternative reality machine on social media, where, Minnesota Reformer editor J. Patrick Coolican wrote, right-wing influencers began peddling misinformation about Hortman’s murder just hours after it happened.
Van Orden was not alone in helping to spread those lies. Wisconsin’s former Republican Gov. Scott Walker also did his part. In a now-deleted post on X, Walker wrote that if the assassination “ends up being done by an ultra-liberal activist … watch for many on the left to be silent or even justify it. Wrong!”
It is now clear that suspected murderer Boelter was a Republican who, as an evangelical Christian minister, gave sermons railing against abortion and LGBTQ people. Walker at least had the good sense to take down his post — lapsing into the silence he’d predicted “many on the left” would observe.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah was shamed by his colleagues into taking down a similarly callous post in which he blamed “Marxists” for the murders and appeared to gloat that it was a “nightmare” for Walz.
Van Orden, on the other hand, doubled down.
“I stand by my statement,” he wrote on X after U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan chastized him for replying to Walz’s remembrance of Hortman by saying that the Democratic governor is “stupid” and a “clown.” Van Orden responded to Pocan with an obscenity. That’s the post he stood by.
Van Orden, who attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election alongside the Capitol insurrectionists, is hardly a model of statesmanship. His boorish behavior in Washington on more than one occasion has embarrassed our state.
But there’s something more troubling going on here than one politician’s loutish behavior.
The horrifying political assassination in Minnesota is a direct result of the same MAGA disinformation machine that went into overdrive trying to distort the truth about the assassin’s aims. Van Orden is one of many Republicans who have hyped the idea that the U.S. is under attack from “criminal, illegal aliens” who were allowed by the Biden administration to “wander around the nation at their leisure.” (In fact, immigrants commit violent crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, and Van Orden’s district is full of hardworking immigrants who lack legal status but without whom Wisconsin’s dairy industry would collapse.)
Republicans following Trump’s lead have stirred up a moral panic around immigration, abortion, LGBTQ people and other non-threats in increasingly hysterical terms. Their rhetoric laid the groundwork for actual physical violence. It has been used to justify the unprecedented spectacle of masked federal agents seizing people on U.S. streets and deporting them without due process, as well as the Trump administration’s outrageous manhandling and handcuffing of Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee, Sen. Alex Padilla in California and a mayoral candidate and Comptroller Brad Lander in New York City.
Trump’s invitation to physical violence against his opponents and the press are a hit with his base. It seems inevitable that eventually someone would take him up on it.
Adding fuel to the fire, Trump’s MAGA minions have made his sociopathic callousness part of their brand. Trump refused to call Walz after the murders in Minnesota, and instead took a gratuitous swipe at the man who campaigned against him as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, calling him “whacked out” and “a mess.”
“I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump told reporters.
In a terse statement, Walz spokesperson Teddy Tschann explained why: “Governor Walz wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans, but this tragedy isn’t about Trump or Walz. It’s about the Hortman family, the Hoffman family, and the State of Minnesota, and the governor remains focused on helping all three to heal.”
What happened in Minnesota is a tragedy for all of us. It’s made worse by the lack of leadership from politicians who not only don’t have the wisdom and maturity to respond appropriately, but who, by failing to take responsibility for their actions, are actively propelling us toward a more terrible future.
Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Prosecutors for the Trump administration filed a brief Monday requesting that a federal judge not dismiss the government’s indictment against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan.
Dugan faces criminal charges after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, along with agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI, arrived in the Milwaukee County Courthouse April 18 to arrest 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz for being in the country illegally.
Flores-Ruiz was set to appear in Dugan’s courtroom that day for a status hearing on misdemeanor charges against him. When Dugan learned that the agents were outside her courtroom, she confronted them and learned they only had an administrative warrant, which was issued by an agency official and not a judge. An administrative warrant doesn’t allow agents to enter private spaces in the courthouse such as Dugan’s courtroom.
Later, while the agents were waiting for Flores-Ruiz in the hallway outside the main courtroom door, Dugan sent him and his attorney out a side door into the hallway. One of the agents rode down the elevator with Flores-Ruiz and he was later arrested on the street.
Dugan was charged with concealing an individual to prevent arrest, a misdemeanor, and obstruction, which is a felony. Last month, Dugan’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case against her, arguing she was acting in her official capacity as a judge and therefore immune from prosecution for her actions and that the federal government is impinging on the state of Wisconsin’s authority to operate its court system.
The case drew national attention, with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel both making public statements about Dugan’s arrest before she’d even been indicted. Legal experts have questioned the strength of the federal government’s case and accused Trump officials of grandstanding to make a political point.
In the Monday filing, federal prosecutors argued that dismissing the case would ignore previously established law that allows judges to face criminal charges.
“Such a ruling would give state court judges carte blanche to interfere with valid law enforcement actions by federal agents in public hallways of a courthouse, and perhaps even beyond,” the prosecutors argued. “Dugan’s desired ruling would, in essence, say that judges are ‘above the law,’ and uniquely entitled to interfere with federal law enforcement.”
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, left, leaves the federal courthouse after a hearing Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Andy Manis / Associated Press)
A Wisconsin judge pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges accusing her of helping a man who is illegally in the country evade U.S. immigration authorities seeking to arrest him in her courthouse.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan entered the plea during a brief arraignment in federal court. Magistrate Judge Stephen Dries scheduled a trial to begin July 21. Dugan’s lead attorney, Steven Biskupic, told the judge that he expects the trial to last a week.
Dugan, her lawyers and prosecutors left the hearing without speaking to reporters.
She is charged with concealing an individual to prevent arrest and obstruction. Prosecutors say she escorted Eduardo Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer out of her courtroom through a back door on April 18 after learning that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in the courthouse seeking to arrest him for being in the country illegally. She could face up to six years in prison if convicted on both counts.
Her attorneys say she’s innocent. They filed a motion Wednesday to dismiss the case, saying she was acting in her official capacity as a judge and therefore is immune to prosecution. They also maintain that the federal government violated Wisconsin’s sovereignty by disrupting a state courtroom and prosecuting a state judge.
A public backlash
Dugan’s arrest has inflamed tensions between the Trump administration and Democrats over the president’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
Dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse ahead of Thursday’s hearing, with some holding signs that read “Only Fascists Arrest Judges — Drop the Charges,” “Department of Justice Over-Reach” and “Keep Your Hands Off Our Judges!!” The crowd chanted “Due process rights,” “Hands off our freedom,” and “Si se puede” — Spanish for “Yes, we can” — which is a rallying cry for immigrant rights advocates.
One man stood alone across the street holding a Trump flag.
Supporters of Judge Hannah Dugan protest outside the United States Federal Building and Courthouse in Milwaukee on Thursday, May 15, 2025, ahead of Dugan’s arraignment on charges that she helped a man in the country illegally evade arrest by immigration authorities. (Todd Richmond / Associated Press)
Nancy Camden, from suburban Mequon north of Milwaukee, was among the protesters calling for the case to be dismissed. She said she believes ICE shouldn’t have tried to arrest Flores-Ruiz inside the courthouse and the Department of Justice “overreached” in charging Dugan.
“How they handled this and made a big show of arresting her and putting her in handcuffs, all of that was intimidation,” Camden said. “And I’m not going to be intimidated. I’m fighting back.”
Esther Cabrera, an organizer with the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, said the charges against Dugan amount to “state-funded repression.”
“If we are going to go after judges, if we’re going to go after mayors, we have to understand that they can come after anybody,” she said. “And that’s kind of why we wanted to make a presence out here today is to say that you can’t come after everyone and it stops here.”
According to court documents, Flores-Ruiz illegally reentered the U.S. after being deported in 2013. Online court records show he was charged with three counts of misdemeanor domestic abuse in Milwaukee County in March, and he was in Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 for a hearing in that case.
According to an FBI affidavit, Dugan was alerted to the agents’ presence by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that the agents appeared to be in the hallway. Dugan was visibly angry and called the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers, the affidavit contends. She and another judge later approached members of the arrest team in the courthouse with what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor.”
After a back-and-forth with the agents over the warrant for Flores-Ruiz, Dugan demanded they speak with the chief judge and led them from the courtroom, according to the affidavit.
After she returned to the courtroom, witnesses heard her say something to the effect of “wait, come with me” before ushering Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out through a door typically used only by deputies, jurors, court staff and in-custody defendants, the affidavit alleges. Flores-Ruiz was free on a signature bond in the abuse case, according to online state court records. Federal agents ultimately detained him outside the courthouse after a foot chase.
The state Supreme Court suspended Dugan last week, saying the move was necessary to preserve public confidence in the judiciary. She was freed after her arrest.
How the case might play out
John Vaudreuil, a former federal prosecutor in Wisconsin who isn’t involved in Dugan’s or Flores-Ruiz’s cases, said the Trump administration seems to want to make an example out of Dugan. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi or Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, rather than the U.S. attorney in Milwaukee, are likely making the decisions on how to proceed, making it less likely prosecutors will reduce the charges against Dugan in a deal, he said.
Her attorneys will likely try to push for a jury trial, Vaudreuil predicted, because they know that “people feel very strongly about the way the president and administration is conducting immigration policy.”
Dugan is represented by some of Wisconsin’s most accomplished lawyers. Biskupic was a federal prosecutor for 20 years and served seven years as U.S. attorney in Milwaukee. Paul Clement, meanwhile, is a former U.S. solicitor general who has argued more than 100 cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Both were appointed to jobs by former Republican President George W. Bush.
Associated Press reporters Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, and Laura Bargfeld contributed to this report.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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