A federal judge on June 16 refused to overturn the obstruction conviction of former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, keeping intact a jury verdict that found she helped a man evade immigration officers outside her courtroom. The ruling sends the case back toward sentencing and leaves Dugan facing the possibility of prison.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said Dugan’s legal team did not meet the standard for reconsideration after the jury convicted her on Dec. 19 of obstructing a federal immigration proceeding. The same jury found her not guilty on a misdemeanor charge of concealing a fugitive. Dugan had resigned from the Milwaukee County Circuit Court about two weeks after the verdict, amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers.
At the center of the fight was whether Eduardo Flores-Ruiz’s arrest was part of a pending proceeding under the federal obstruction statute. Dugan’s lawyers pointed to a Virginia immigration case overturned in April and argued there was no pending proceeding because ICE was simply making an arrest. Adelman rejected that reading, writing that the case did not involve a random street encounter but a targeted operation with an arrest warrant for Flores-Ruiz. In a separate filing, her legal defense team said, “The court’s decision is wrong.”
The case has been closely watched because it was brought by the Trump administration during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and became an early test of how courts would respond when immigration enforcement collided with a judge’s courtroom authority. Adelman noted in his ruling that ICE can issue its own warrants and carry out removals without involving a court, and he suggested that distinction mattered to the statute’s reach. He also raised the broader practical point that ICE makes arrests every day, asking whether that would mean millions of pending proceedings.
Dugan now faces up to five years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines generally call for probation in cases like hers, where the defendant has no criminal history and the crime was nonviolent. No new sentencing date was immediately set, but the ruling leaves the verdict standing and puts the focus on what punishment, if any, the court will impose next.
