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The FBI has arrested a local judge in Wisconsin on obstruction charges for allegedly helping an immigrant evade detention by federal agents, US authorities said.
FBI agents arrested Judge Hannah Dugan on Friday morning at a Milwaukee courthouse, said a US Marshals spokesperson.
Kash Patel, FBI director, alleged in a post on X that the judge last week had “intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse”.
“Thankfully our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public,” he added.
Patel deleted an original post about Dugan before posting on the matter again on Friday afternoon. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the X posts.
Dugan has been a judge in Milwaukee County since 2016, primarily handling cases in the court’s misdemeanour section. Prior to her time on the bench, she worked with legal aid organisations, including Catholic Charities of Southeast Wisconsin. She is also a past president of the Milwaukee Bar Association.
The exceptionally rare move brings tensions between Donald Trump’s administration and the judiciary to new heights. It is the latest effort to push the boundaries of the executive branch’s authority in ways that raise existential questions about the country’s separation of powers.
The president and his allies have railed against judges for weeks after the judiciary froze White House initiatives ranging from immigration to government staff firings that they deemed illegal. With Congress taking a passive role, the courts have become the main venue to measure the legality of orders Trump has unleashed since his return to power in January.
The man at the centre of the case is Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen whom the FBI alleges re-entered the US illegally after being removed once before. Court records indicate he is 30 years old.
He was charged last month with three counts of domestic abuse and attended a hearing before Dugan on April 18, according to an FBI affidavit. Immigration authorities a day earlier issued an arrest warrant for Flores-Ruiz.
Law enforcement officers last week waited for Flores-Ruiz outside Dugan’s courtroom. When informed of the agents’ presence, Dugan “became visibly angry, commented that the situation was ‘absurd’, left the bench” and later “escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel out of the courtroom through the ‘jury door’,” the affidavit said.
Agents detained Flores-Ruiz outside the courthouse after a foot chase. A lawyer for Flores-Ruiz declined to comment.
Dugan was released pending arraignment next month.
A lawyer representing Dugan said in a statement that she had “committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge”, adding she “will defend herself vigorously, and looks forward to being exonerated”.
The case hits at a hot-button issue for Trump, who has prioritised immigration and has promised mass deportations. He has attacked “sanctuary” regions, which limit or bar co-operation with federal immigration authorities, and is seeking to withhold funds from some of these areas — efforts that have been frozen by a federal judge.
Milwaukee mayor Cavalier Johnson told local media in January that he had not declared the city a “sanctuary”, but said it did not ask people for their immigration status or collaborate with immigration or customs enforcement agencies.
“I don’t want to put the city of Milwaukee in a position where we’re being targeted by the Trump administration,” Johnson added.
The administration is locked in fraught legal wrangling over the removal of hundreds of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to an El Salvadoran prison — a case that has reached the US Supreme Court with the government admitting that at least in one case, an immigrant was removed erroneously.
Federal judges have fiercely criticised the government for failing to provide detailed information around the flights to El Salvador, with one finding probable cause for contempt.
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