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Notes -
The FBI this morning arrested a Wisconsin state judge on charges of concealing an illegal alien from arrest.
The initial criminal complaint is here. For those of you who prefer to watch TV instead of read, here is attorney general Pam Bondi giving the details on Fox News. The accusation is that upon seeing federal agents waiting outside her courtroom to serve an administrative warrent for the arrest of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz (who is an illegal alien currently being charged with battery), Judge Hannah Dugan escorted Flores-Ruiz out of the courtroom through the jury door so that he could evade arrest.
For all of the "Kash Patel Arrests Judge" headlines I saw this morning, this seems totally fine? It looks like an open and shut case if the facts alleged in the complaint are true. It sounds like there ought to be plenty of witnesses (it literally took place in a courthouse). State-law judges don't have jurisdiction over federal agents executing federal functions. An illegal alien in court for an unrelated violent crime is an incredibly unsympathetic defendant. All of the smarter left-leaning commentators I follow seem to be keeping quiet on this, which seems smart.
The question is if they are required to render aid to federal law enforcement. Based on the warrant, it is generally illegal to "conceal an individual to prevent his discovery or arrest" and "obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the US". The latter requires corruption, force, or threats. The former seems prone to selective enforcement, I can't imagine the DA going after every grandma who conceals her grandson from the cops.
The affidavit states that it is very convenient for ICE to arrest people in courthouses because they know that they will be unarmed. This is of course the equilibrium if the worst thing which can happen to you in a court house is getting arrested for whatever crime you are accused of in the first place. Few fugitives accused of murder answer their court summons, after all. If the worst thing which can happen to you in a courthouse is getting shipped to some hellish megaprison in some country where human rights just are not a thing, then you might think twice about appearing in court unarmed. And while the affidavit claims that so far, ICE is restricting this practice to criminal defendants, it might already have a chilling effect on witnesses and participants in civil cases.
If an accused is willing to show up in court when summoned, that is saving the state system the resources they would otherwise have to spend on tracking, arresting and imprisoning that person. If the feds freeload on the state system, in the end it will be state police who will have to spend a lot of resources on tracking illegals wanted for some minor infraction like they are wanted for murder.
Of course, some other judge signed the arrest warrant, so it seems somewhat likely that they will make that one stick.
FWIW, 1505 reads:
1071 reads:
From my layman's perspective, I think that it is probably more likely that they will get her for 1071. Escorting a known fugitive through a non-public area seems the kind of thing which qualifies.
For 1505, she obviously did not use threats or force, so she would have acted corruptly. Now, if she had learned in her function as a judge that there was a investigation against her defendant and then proceeded to warn him about that, this would be a textbook case of corruption.
However, it does not seem clear-cut that she learned of this due to her function as a judge.
Arguably, this constitutes a chain of gossip, not a formal court communication. (Of course, it could be that things learned through gossip are also subject to 1505, like if a cop learned through gossip that another cop was planning an arrest.) But then she proceeds to use her power as a judge to get the confirmation about who they are after, which seems really stupid of her -- because she no longer can claim that she did not know of the arrest warrant. So it seems likely that they will get her for that, too, if the FBI agent's account is substantially correct.
I think it depends on the specifics. But it would seem reasonable under some imaginable set of facts and completely bonkers in another imaginable set of facts. So much is riding on how you actually operationalize it.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, it might be more resource efficient to send him to jail longer (because of the failure to appear) in a single go. Moreover, an FTA charge is an extremely easy one to stick because you don't need a ton of facts or motions practice or anything else -- it's extremely well documented whether or not the guy was required to appear and whether he didn't.
In that respect, it's like the felon in possession of a firearm charge: not always the most serious but the easiest one to charge, try and prove.
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