Hannah Dugan directed Eduardo Flores-Ruiz — a Mexican national with charges for strangulation, suffocation, battery, and domestic abuse — out a back exit of the Milwaukee County courthouse in April 2025 while ICE agents waited to take him into custody following his court appearance. She was the judge. He was in her courtroom on a domestic violence hearing.
She faced up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine for what she did. Instead a sympathetic judge gave her a small fine and no jail time.
A federal jury convicted Dugan of felony obstruction of justice in December 2025, making her the first Wisconsin state judge ever convicted on such a charge. Federal sentencing guidelines recommended 15 to 21 months behind bars. Prosecutors pushed for a sentence in that range. Instead, U.S. District Judge Lynn S. Adelman — a Democrat appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 — decided prison wasn't necessary.
Adelman's reasoning is worth reading in full. "The defendant is 67 years old with no prior record. I don't think she has any correctional services needs. She has a lifetime of service to others. This is a person who has done a lot of good in our community," he said from the bench on July 8, 2026. "This is a situation where an otherwise good person made a bad decision in the moment."
A bad decision in the moment. That's the framing for a sitting judge who, according to trial testimony, sent ICE agents on a detour to the chief judge's office while she personally steered a man with a violent criminal record and his attorney toward a back door. Then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin described Flores-Ruiz's rap sheet as including "strangulation and suffocation, battery and domestic abuse." This wasn't a judge having a moment of confusion. This was a deliberate obstruction of federal law enforcement to protect a violent criminal who had already been removed from the country once and come back illegally.
Adelman went further: "This goes beyond. Any judge or other public servant who has seen what happened here would be deterred from obstruction. It's hard to see how adding any prison time to that will add any meaningful deterrence." So the conviction itself is supposedly punishment enough. The embarrassment. The resignation she submitted on January 3, 2026, before the state legislature could impeach her. Losing the robe, according to this logic, is the real sentence.
Dugan herself offered a statement before sentencing, claiming her actions "were consistent with the expressed administrative and community concerns for our state courthouse" and were not done "with any malicious" intent. The jury that heard the evidence disagreed. She plans to appeal, as reported by Conservative Review.
Here's what the deterrence argument misses. A regular citizen who obstructs a federal agent — lies about a fugitive's location, helps someone dodge an arrest warrant — doesn't get the "lifetime of service" discount. Doesn't get the "no correctional services needs" pass. Gets booked, gets sentenced, does time. The guidelines exist for a reason: 15 to 21 months, calculated by the same formula applied to everyone who commits this federal felony. Adelman didn't dispute the guidelines. He just decided they didn't apply to this particular defendant.
No probation. No prison. A $5,000 fine on a felony obstruction conviction where a violent offender walked free from federal custody because a judge decided her politics outranked the law.
The maximum fine was $250,000. She paid two percent of it.