Context and inaction around Judge Hannah Dugan’s Arrest
On the morning of Friday, April 25th, FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, for allegedly protecting a migrant from arrest by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) at the courthouse. This incident is getting mainstream national news attention. That likely means other journalists will provide details and new developments faster than we can.
What Milwaukee Beagle can provide is context and information about why this happened and who failed to prevent it. The primary aggressor and perpetuator of harm here is FBI director Kash Patel, not Judge Dugan. The attack on Dugan is best understood as a new front in the Trump administration’s war against the non-controllable judiciary and the rule of law in general. But, there are also local players who have chosen sides with their decisions and actions (or inactions). Our intent is to clearly name those players and put their actions into context.
ICE arrests at the courthouse
Dugan’s arrest arose from ICE agents coming to Judge Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 to arrest a migrant named Eduardo Flores-Ruiz. They did not have a judicial warrant, and Dugan allegedly allowed Flores-Ruiz to exit her courtroom through a side door –although the facts on this are still disputed. Flores-Ruiz was spotted and arrested shortly thereafter, outside the courthouse.
This is the essential part of this story, one that is often overlooked or intentionally left out: ICE agents bilked their way into a Milwaukee County courthouse –via a document that ICE issued to itself, but that looks much like a warrant issued by a judge –in order to interrupt the ongoing trial of someone accused of misdemeanors. No judge or jury or even agency apparatchik found Flores-Ruiz guilty of the accusations that brought him to that courtroom –but still, a rogue border enforcement agency hundreds of miles from any border used the courtroom as a holding pen.
This was the third recent instance of ICE agents disrupting local due process by entering Milwaukee area courthouses to arrest migrants under Trump’s mass deportation program. The first was on March 30th, 2025. Local organizers and politicians expressed outrage about these arrests, how they make the courthouse an unsafe place for migrants, violate due process, and undermine public trust. Few of them have power to do anything about it, and the ones who do chose inaction.
When fascists are seizing power, an essential question is: which part of the existing political establishment can be relied on to resist? This requires critical examination of the players in that establishment. Who will enthusiastically join the fascists? Who will whine about it, but ultimately enable the rise of fascism? Who will make loud, exciting statements to garner our trust, and then betray us to the fascists?
Here in Milwaukee, we’re definitely seeing enthusiastic bootlickers, and we’re seeing a lot of whining and statement-making, but from some of those same people, we’re also seeing betrayal and enabling. Tracking actions over the last year and reactions to first ICE’s, and now the FBI’s moves against Milwaukee judiciary, we can sort the bootlickers from the enablers, and start to identify who to rely on to actually defend Milwaukee against Trump’s police state.
Local bootlickers target Dugan
Local reactionaries instantly decided that Judge Dugan must be guilty of something, and whipped themselves into a frenzy trying to pin down what, exactly. Right wing troll and radio host Dan O’Donnell seems to be the first of them to have caught wind of Judge Dugan’s act of human solidarity. On April 22, he snitched her out on X, and talked about it on his radio show. Then, one of Milwaukee area’s weirder Republicans – the bathroom peeping, clown punching, Bob Donovan – boosted Dan’s snitching with a news release and public calls for FBI action. Other Republicans have been similarly screeching about Tony Evers sending out a memo reminding state employees that the people they deal with have a right to privacy and that ICE should behave within its legal boundaries.
There isn’t much more to say about these craven, bootlicking sycophants. They act like immigrants aren’t human and expect everyone else to join and support their bigotry. Discourse with them is hopeless. The only option is to defeat them, something the Wisconsin Democratic Party unfortunately failed to do, when they last had the chance.
In November of 2024, Democrats had new, slightly fairer maps and thus a historic opportunity to take the state legislature. WISDEMS raised and spent far more than Republicans on those races, but still lost many of them, including LuAnn Bird’s effort to oust the aforementioned Donovan from the Assembly. We don’t have space here to fully break down campaign numbers, but it does seem many collectively-raised funds went to lousy centrist candidates. Some wasted that money running on spineless milquetoast messaging with little to no ground game. Others had long incumbencies which should have made them safe, but they took a lion’s share of funds to only barely win. Some centrists also launched a genocide-inspired primary challenge in one of the bluest districts, draining their own, and the incumbent’s resources that could have gone to winning campaigns like LuAnn Bird’s.
The failure of national level centrists to restrain fascism and defeat Trump brought us hyper-aggressive ICE and FBI agents, but the failure of state level centrists to prioritize defeating gross weirdos like Donovan is what drew their attention to us, and to Judge Dugan.
Who will defend Milwaukee?
This brings us to the aforementioned collaborator, the kind who is often essential to the fascist project: the elected official/decision maker/person in power for whatever reason who is “simply doing their job.” And, here, doing ICE’s job for them, is First Judicial District Chief Judge Carl Ashley.
On April 14, the Milwaukee County Board’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and General Services (JLEGS) committee drafted and passed a resolution requesting that County Executive David Crowley, Sheriff Denita Ball, and Chief Judge Carl Ashley protect the county courthouse from actions just like those taken by ICE agents on April 18. Milwaukee Beagle covered that hearing, and called on our readers to demand fast robust action from Crowley, Ball, and Ashley. The resolution passed that committee, and ten days later, the whole board. It’s easy to spot the most enthusiastic bootlicker in that bunch; Supervisor Patty Logsdon abstained on both votes, pretending to be afraid of reprisals from Trump. Sadly, defenders are harder to find. This resolution is just words on paper, a minimal-effort request that someone else take responsibility and action. Watching the JLEGS committee hearing we can see some board members speaking more robustly than others, but that is, again, just words.
Crowley, Ball, and Ashley didn’t need to wait for the County Board’s request. They didn’t need to wait until March 30, when ICE started showing up at the courthouse. They should have predicted and prepared for Trumpian overreach starting last November. The behavior of Trump’s administration is extreme, but not unexpected, and anyone caught off guard and scrambling to respond weeks after they cross a line can’t be taken seriously.
Chief Judge Ashley spoke before JLEGS (at 32:36). He said he, Crowley, and Ball were already working on a plan, but that they’d “include protocols that are acceptable to ICE and meaningful to our community.” ICE is a lawless entity contemporaneously deporting people to a Salvadoran gulag in defiance of court orders. Why would they voluntarily agree to do anything that meaningfully protects people in Milwaukee?
Judge Ashley predicted this impossible document would be out soon, in the next week or two. That was April 14. Four days later, nothing had happened, and ICE returned to the courthouse to arrest Flores-Ruiz. After another week of inaction, the FBI came to the courthouse and arrested Judge Dugan.
A judge in Boston also recently stood up to ICE by holding them in contempt for coming into his courtroom. A federal judge dismissed his ruling, normalizing ICE’s aggression. Similarly, Judge Dugan’s boss, Chief Judge Ashley has failed to express any public support for her, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court – including liberals everyone worked hard to elect this and last spring – have quietly and unilaterally suspended her from serving as a judge.
Is there a meaningful, legal protocol that the county executive or sheriff should have done to stop ICE? Maybe not. We’re not legal experts, but it sounds like the obstruction charge Patel is bringing against Dugan is dubious enough that they would have similarly retaliated against any but the most docile responses. The trouble is, Trump has been wading headlong into the murky waters of legal ambiguity for years, while Democrats stand on the edges, wringing their hands. When you are facing a problem, it is important to never be alone. Right now, Trump is attacking the judiciary, and the judiciary has been standing alone against him, just like county officials left Judge Hanna Dugan standing alone. If she defeats the charges and resumes her position, Trump still won, because he got a judge suspended for months. Someone who recognized the humanity of migrants, and cared about their due process rights has been removed from a position to protect them, and the already incredibly overburdened courts are even more dysfunctional. If other county officials had taken on the risk Donovan’s snitching and Trump’s retaliation, they may have found themselves in a legal fight instead of Dugan, but a needed judge would still be on the bench.
County Executive David Crowley’s initial response to Dugan’s arrest was “we should let the legal process play out.” After protests and public statements from others, he shifted, joining criticism of Patel. At minimum, we need politicians whose first move is to denounce fascism, not who wait for the wind to be at their back before joining dissent. Crowley has clearly failed to meet this moment. Sheriff Denita Ball has been avoiding comment on ICE and Trump since January, and this incident doesn’t appear to have inspired her to break that complicit silence.
When looking for defenders in this time of crisis, Milwaukeeans clearly must look away from these elected officials. We find that the people of Milwaukee will have to defend ourselves. There were multiple protests downtown on the day of Dugan’s arrest, and at the FBI building in Saint Francis the day after. Voces De La Frontera, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, and the Milwaukee Turners have led the charge and drove a stronger narrative than anyone in county government.
