Trial kicks off for Milwaukee judge accused of obstructing ICE

MILWAUKEE (CN) — Federal attorneys sprung into their opening argument of a Milwaukee judge’s high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement obstruction trial with a dramatic quote from Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom audio recording: “’I’ll do it. I’ll take the heat.’ That’s what Judge Hannah Dugan said.”

Dugan, 66, was arrested by FBI agents in late April and indicted on charges of felony obstruction and misdemeanor concealing an individual, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, from ICE agents in early May.

In his opening arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Keith Alexander focused on Dugan’s apparently nefarious intentions. He asserted to the jury that the arrest operation of Flores-Ruiz was routine until Dugan got involved, and that Dugan was on a tear to separate the six-person arrest team so that Flores-Ruiz could escape.

Flores-Ruiz appeared in Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 for a pretrial conference in an unrelated matter, where agents from ICE, FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration were waiting to detain him for entering the country illegally in 2013.

Upon learning that immigration officers were waiting in the public hallway outside of her courtroom, Dugan left to confront them. She directed five plainclothes officers to Chief Judge Carl Ashley’s office at the end of the hall, then returned to her courtroom.

From there, the federal government says she quickly rescheduled Flores-Ruiz’s hearing and ushered him and his attorney out of the courtroom through a private hallway to evade ICE, who arrested Flores-Ruiz after a short chase outside of the building.

During its opening, the government played snippets of the courtroom audio, though extremely garbled at times, to support this version of events. But the defense had another interpretation of the evidence.

Former U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic drilled down on some of the details Alexander had, he says, twisted to make Dugan look guilty. He claimed no one told Dugan that the arrest team had a warrant or even that they were looking for Flores-Ruiz.

He also painted a picture of a confused and anxious local judiciary that simply didn’t know how to handle the “increasingly aggressive” ICE directive. The jury saw emails between county judges, including Dugan, discussing the harmful effect ICE has in the courthouse and a draft plan for dealing with immigration officials.

Both sides published pictures and videos, which defense attorney Jason Luczak dubbed photos and videos of the private hallway that Dugan led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney through “Blair witch project-esque."

The hallway has two exits — one which leads to a staircase to the fifth floor below and another that opens into the public hallway about 11 feet from the main entrance to the courtroom.

Although Alexander attempted to use comments from Dugan about sending them “downstairs” to argue that she intended them to disappear to the floor below, Biskupic made a counter argument that elicited several nods from the jury and gallery.

“The best evidence of what [Dugan] intended is [Attorney Mercedes] De La Rosa and Flores-Ruiz exiting into the public hallway, where there was an agent to the left and an agent to the right," he said.

After they left, Dugan returned to the bench to get through her 33-case schedule before her Good Friday church service.

The federal government called three witnesses on Monday: FBI Special Agent Erin Luecker, who oversaw the investigation into Dugan; ICE Supervisor Anthony Nimtz, who signed the arrest warrant for Flores-Ruiz; and FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Baker, who was part of the arrest team.

Though the testimony was largely procedural, the defense’s cross-examination of Luecker brought to light several details that the initial complaint left out, including that the arrest team used a Signal chat called “frozen water,” which is typically seen on social media to describe ICE, on April 18 to coordinate the operation.

Saying that it didn’t surprise her, Luecker quipped “Yeah, there has been some high profile figures using Signal in the federal government recently."

Although Dugan’s team has not yet renewed its motion to dismiss on the basis of her claimed immunity from prosecution for judicial acts, it’s only a matter of time before they make the dispositive argument that the government failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she intended to obstruct and conceal.

Follow @desdev5