Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan's defense argues 'top levels of government' pushed to bring charges

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — The “top levels of government” were involved in bringing charges against a Wisconsin judge who helped a Mexican immigrant evade federal authorities, her defense attorney told jurors during closing arguments at her trial Thursday, attempting to blunt arguments from prosecutors that the judge acted inappropriately.

Prosecutors argued that Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan put her personal beliefs above the law.

“You don’t have to agree with immigration enforcement policy to see this was wrong,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Brown Watzka told the jury in closing arguments. “You just have to agree the law applies equally to everyone.”

The case was expected to go to the jury late Thursday after a four-day trial.

The highly unusual charges against a sitting judge are an extraordinary consequence of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Dugan’s supporters say Trump is looking to make an example of her to blunt judicial opposition to immigration arrests.

Prosecutors have tried to show that Dugan intentionally interfered with members of a federal immigration task force’s efforts to arrest 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz at the Milwaukee County Courthouse.

Dugan defense attorney Jason Luczak told jurors that she would not jeopardize her career by “going out on a limb” to help the wanted man slip away.

“Give me a break,” Luczak said.

Dugan did not take the stand in her own defense as she faces obstruction and concealment charges.

Luczak told jurors that they are a check on government overreach and that judges remain confused about immigration officials’ authority in courthouses even now, months after Flores-Ruiz’s arrest, Luczak said.

But prosecutor Brown Watzka told the jury that Dugan provided Flores-Ruiz with an escape route.

“A judge does not have absolute authority to do whatever she wants whenever she puts on her robe,” Brown Watzka said. “The defendant is not on trial for her views on immigration policy. She is on trial because she made a series of deliberate decisions to step outside the law in order to help an individual evade federal arrest.”

Brown Watzka pointed out that Dugan had a whispered discussion with her court reporter about which of them should guide Flores-Ruiz out the private door and down a back staircase out of the arrest team’s sight.

Flores-Ruiz ultimately did not take the stairs and instead went through the private door into the public hallway, but Brown Watzka said that means nothing.

“The only thing that matters is the defendant’s intent,” she said.

Dugan's attorneys called four witnesses Thursday, including a public defender who took photographs of the arrest team in the hallway and two judges who testified that a draft policy about how to handle immigration arrests was in flux in the weeks before Flores-Ruiz’s arrest.

Former Milwaukee mayor and Democratic congressman Tom Barrett testified that he’s known Dugan since high school and described her as “extremely honest.”

Officers who came to arrest Flores-Ruiz on April 18 testified that they learned he was in the country illegally after he was arrested in Milwaukee on state battery charges. They testified that Dugan and another judge, Kristela Cervera, stepped into the hallway wearing their robes. Dugan angrily told four members of the team to report to the chief judge's office, the officers testified.

As Cervera led them to the office, Dugan returned to her courtroom and led Flores-Ruiz out a private door into the hallway. Prosecutors produced transcripts of audio recordings from microphones in her courtroom that show Dugan told her court reporter that she'd take “the heat” for showing Flores-Ruiz out the private door.

Dugan’s defense attorney Luczak suggested that Cervera was cooperating with the government to avoid being charged herself and was coached to testify that “judges shouldn’t help defendants evade arrest.”

“You’re either a friend or an enemy of the government,” Luczak said.

Luczak also implied that members of the arrest team were exaggerating when they testified that Dugan angrily confronted them.

“She’s stern,” Luczak said. “She’s a judge. She orders people around. She tells them what to do. She’s not being confrontational. She’s being a judge.”

The case is a “shot across the bow” to state judges everywhere meant to intimidate them, said Howard Schweber, a political scientist and affiliate faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“It is unthinkable that this prosecution would have been brought in a prior administration,” Schweber said. “This is truly extraordinary, I would even say unprecedented certainly in my adult lifetime. I have never seen anything like it. And professionally its quite shocking.”

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Associated Press writer Scott Bauer contributed to this report.