A federal judge on Tuesday refused to throw out Hannah Dugan’s obstruction of justice conviction, leaving in place the verdict against the former Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge in the Ice Misidentified Immigrant Case. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said the jury’s Dec. 19 finding will stand.
The ruling matters now because Adelman had put sentencing on hold June 3 while he weighed whether the conviction should survive. Dugan, 67, had already resigned from the bench two weeks after the verdict, and the decision keeps her headed toward sentencing with the case still carrying the possibility of prison time.
Dugan was convicted of helping Eduardo Flores-Ruiz leave the courthouse while ICE officers were there to detain him. Her lawyers argued that the conviction should be erased because a federal appeals court in April overturned a key Virginia immigration case they said had been used against her, and they also said there was no pending proceeding against Flores-Ruiz in her courtroom, only a warrant for his arrest. Adelman rejected that reading and wrote that the attempted arrest did count as a pending proceeding because it was planned and targeted.
He drew a line between the case before him and the Virginia case, where an immigrant detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents escaped, was recaptured and then was indicted for obstructing a pending immigration proceeding. The appeals court said that ICE action did not qualify as a pending proceeding under the federal obstruction law. Adelman, by contrast, said ICE can issue its own warrants and carry out a removal without a court, and that made the effort to arrest Flores-Ruiz different in kind.
The dispute cuts to the heart of how far courthouse interventions can go before they become criminal. Prosecutors said the Virginia case did not fit Dugan’s facts, and Adelman agreed. In his view, the attempted arrest at the courthouse was not a loose enforcement effort but a specific operation already in motion, which meant the obstruction statute reached her conduct.
Dugan now faces up to five years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines generally call for probation for defendants like her who have no criminal history and are convicted of a nonviolent crime. Adelman did not immediately set a new sentencing date, leaving the next step unresolved even as the conviction itself remains intact.
The case was an early test of how courts would respond to President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, and it put a former judge at the center of that fight. Dugan had served on the Milwaukee County Circuit Court for nine years, and after her conviction Trump allies branded her an activist judge while supporters said she had been unfairly targeted. Tuesday’s ruling does not end the case, but it does narrow the question left for later: whether the punishment will be probation or prison.
