Grand Jury Indicts Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by the FBI on April 25, 2025, on charges of obstruction. Image via LinkedIn

A federal grand jury indicted Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan Tuesday after determining there was probable cause to bring charges against her in a pending case.

Prosecutors allege she broke federal law by helping a man evade immigration enforcement last month.

She’s charged in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin with obstructing or impeding a proceeding, a felony, and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest, a misdemeanor.

Grand jury proceedings are closed to the public. Tuesday’s indictment means members of that grand jury concluded there was enough evidence to file charges against Dugan. That standard is lower than the need to prove someone’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before securing a conviction.

“As she said after her unnecessary arrest, Judge Dugan asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court,” Dugan’s attorney, Craig Mastantuono, said in a statement Tuesday evening.

An affidavit filed by an FBI agent last month alleges Dugan led a man through a back door of her court room, intended for jurors, on April 18 so the man could avoid arrest by federal immigration agents. After the man left the courthouse, agents chased him on foot and arrested him at a nearby intersection, federal authorities say.

That man was scheduled to appear in Dugan’s Milwaukee County courtroom on state-level misdeamnor charges of battery related to domestic violence. The affidavit alleges the man, whose name is Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was in the country illegally. It says border patrol agents ordered him to be sent back to Mexico in 2013 and he was deported thereafter.

There is no evidence “indicating that Flores-Ruiz sought or obtained permission to return to the United States,” the federal affidavit says.

After learning that agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement had showed up to her courtroom, Duggan became “visibly angry,” the affidavit says.

The affidavit says Duggan asked the agents if they had a judicial warrant, which is a warrant signed by judge, and an agent told her they did not. It says an agent offered to show her an administrative warrant, which is a warrant issued by a federal agency, for Flores-Ruiz’s arrest.

A deportation officer told the judge he was “in a public space and had a valid immigration warrant,” the affidavit says.

According to prosecutors, Dugan directed the federal agents to the county’s chief judge’s office, where they went to discuss courthouse policies involving ICE arrests.

While most of the agents were gone, prosecutors say witnesses saw Dugan escort Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out of the jury door. Dugan told Flores-Ruiz’s attorney he could appear in court for his hearing via Zoom at a later date, according to an indictment document filed in federal court Tuesday night.

Dugan is not currently hearing cases in Milwaukee County. The state Supreme Court suspended her late last month, citing the pending federal case against her.

Federal authorities arrested Dugan at the Milwaukee County courthouse on April 25 and she appeared in court later that morning.

She’s due back in U.S. District Court for a preliminary hearing this Thursday.

Since Trump took office early this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested several people inside the Milwaukee County courthouse.

“The reasons for this include not only the fact that law enforcement knows the location at which the wanted individual should be located but also the fact that the wanted individual would have entered through a security checkpoint and thus unarmed, minimizing the risk of injury to law enforcement, the public, and the wanted individual,” the FBI’s affidavit said.

But local leaders in Milwaukee County have pushed back against ICE arrests at the local courthouse, saying the presence of federal immigration agents discourages people from showing up to hearings and from reporting crimes.

“When federal immigration enforcement takes place in our courthouse complex, it sends families into hiding, deters survivors of violence from seeking protection and discourages tenants from asserting their rights,” Milwaukee County Board Chair Marcelia Nicholson said last month, prior to Dugan’s arrest.

On April 24, Milwaukee County’s Board of Supervisors approved a non-binding resolution stating the county “stands firm in its opposition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operating outside the limits of the law in and around the Milwaukee County Courthouse Complex.”

Grand jury indicts Milwaukee County judge after prosecutors allege she helped a man evade ICE was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.