Trump’s Attorney General Warns Arrested Judge Is Just the Beginning

Attorney General Pam Bondi warned Friday that the arrest of a judge in Wisconsin was only the beginning of Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown on the judiciary.

Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested earlier in the day on charges of obstruction for supposedly misdirecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents away from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an immigrant attending a pretrial hearing at the Milwaukee County Courthouse last week.

While discussing the case during an appearance on Fox News, Bondi said that judges attempting to help immigrants evade arrest were “deranged.”

“I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not,” Bondi said. “And we are sending a very strong message today: If you are harboring a fugitive, we don’t care who you are, if you are helping hide one, if you are giving a TdA member guns, anyone who is illegally in this country, we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

Crucially, Dugan is not accused of supplying a member of Tren de Aragua with guns. She is charged with two federal counts of obstruction, one for concealing a person from discovery and arrest, and another for obstruction of federal government proceedings.

According to the Department of Justice’s filing, Dugan allegedly let Florez-Ruiz enter the courtroom through a side door typically reserved for a jury. He then used a public hallway in the courthouse to get into an elevator and exit the building before ICE officers could stop him. If Dugan is convicted, the charges may result in a maximum penalty of six years in prison.

During an appearance in federal court Friday, Dugan’s lawyer Craig Mastantuono said that his client “wholeheartedly protests the arrest and believes it was not made in the interests of public safety.”

Bondi, who has been a fierce defender of the president’s immigration agenda—including its wrongful deportation of immigrants—has now taken up the mantle of antagonizing state and federal judges on behalf of the increasingly hostile executive branch.

Last week, Trump’s director of counterterrorism argued that anyone opposed to Trump’s immigration agenda was “aiding and abetting” terrorists.

Dugan’s arrest comes as Trump continues his widespread attack on immigration judges, eight of whom have been fired or put on leave in the last week across California, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.

The phone number that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was using to discuss sensitive war plans on Signal was used on multiple other public platforms, according to The New York Times.

Hegseth’s number was found on WhatsApp, Facebook, and a fantasy sports website, among other websites. This is another absurd security development for the country’s top defense secretary.

Even lower-ranking officials are warned not to use their personal phone for government purposes. Hegseth’s digital breadcrumbs left all over the internet have almost certainly opened him up to cyberattacks, experts said.

“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Mike Casey told the Times. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”

This comes as multiple news outlets have detailed chaos and derision inside Hegseth’s Pentagon in his few months as defense secretary.

Read more at The New York Times.

The FBI arrested a sitting U.S. judge Friday for “obstructing an immigration arrest operation,” a jarring escalation in Donald Trump’s nationwide assault on immigrants, the judicial system, and anybody who opposes his mass deportation efforts. Democrats are reeling.

Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on charges of obstruction after she helped an undocumented immigrant evade arrest in her courtroom, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X Friday morning. The 30-year-old man, originally from Mexico, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, is now in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. His arrest marks at least the third time in recent months that ICE agents have appeared at the courthouse with arrest warrants, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require high legal bar,” Wisconsin Representative Gwen Moore said, shortly after the arrest in her home state. “I will be following this case closely, and facts will come out, however, I am very alarmed at [these] increasingly lawless actions of the Trump Admin, and in particular ICE, who have been defying court orders and acting with disregard for the Constitution.”

“It is remarkable that the Administration would dare to start arresting state court judges,” said Representative Jamie Raskin. “It’s a whole new descent into government chaos.”

“The Trump administration again is breaking norms in how it’s dealing with immigration, the legal system, and normalcy.… This is stuff I expect from Third World countries,” Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan told Axios.

Representative Darren Soto echoed Pocan’s disbelief that a judge was arrested in the United States. “Arresting federal judges is third world country dictator type of stuff. Everyday they get more desperate,” Soto wrote on X. “This will be bounced out of court as quick as the rest of their illegal actions.”

Senator Tammy Baldwin called Dugan’s arrest a “gravely serious and drastic move,” but in line with Trump’s attack on the rule of law.

The president has ignored a number of court orders relating to his unlawful deportations and will apparently punish anyone who gets in his way. At least eight immigration judges across three states have now been fired or put on leave.

“Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by,” Baldwin said in a statement on X. “While details of this exact case remain minimal, this action fits into the deeply concerning pattern of this president’s lawless behavior and undermining courts and Congress’s checks on his power.”

The Justice Department quietly invoked the Alien Enemies act last month to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the power to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes as long as they suspect them to be an “alien enemy.” USA Today obtained the memo that contained this order on Friday.

“As much as practicable, officers should follow the proactive procedures above—and have an executed Warrant of Apprehension and Removal—before contacting an Alien Enemy,” the memo reads. “However, that will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing Alien Enemies.… An officer may encounter a suspected Alien Enemy in the natural course of the officer’s enforcement activity, such as when apprehending other validated members of Tren de Aragua. Given the dynamic nature of enforcement operations, officers in the field are authorized to apprehend aliens upon a reasonable belief that the alien meets all four requirements to be validated as an Alien Enemy. This authority includes entering an Alien Enemy’s residence to make an AEA apprehension where circumstances render it impracticable to first obtain a signed Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal” (emphasis added).

In the memo, the Justice Department defined an “alien enemy” as anyone who is 14 years of age or older, not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, a citizen of Venezuela, and “a member of the hostile enemy Tren de Aragua,” per the Alien Enemy Validation Guide, a document that has already been slammed by immigration experts.

The broad definition has already resulted in the apprehension and deportation of more than 200 men to El Salvador who just happened to have tattoos, like gay makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero.

This type of order will likely lead to more indiscriminate arrests and wanton racial profiling. The memo, which is from March 14, is another massive departure from the U.S. immigration norms.

Donald Trump’s administration will restore student visas that were terminated “solely based on” minor legal infractions.

The Department of Justice announced in federal court Friday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was developing a new policy regarding students with F-1 visas. In the meantime, international students’ terminated online visa records would “remain Active or shall be reactivated” in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program, or SEVIS, database.

“ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Carilli, referring to the National Crime Information Center, which holds records of students’ misdemeanor charges and dismissed cases that had been used as justification for their loss of legal status.

Crucially, under the current F-1 visa policies, students can only be removed for committing violent felonies, not the minor and dismissed charges levied against the students the Trump administration has targeted.

Earlier this week, a federal judge ordered that the Trump administration reinstate the legal status of 133 students who had their visas revoked by Tuesday evening, arguing that they had been “abruptly and illegally” terminated by ICE.

The Trump administration has terminated the student visa records of nearly 1,900 international students at more than 280 colleges and universities, as part of its crackdown on immigration and pro-Palestinian speech. The terminations have summoned more than 100 lawsuits, with judges in more than 50 cases across 23 states issuing orders to undo the government’s actions.