I find it extremely doubtful that she told the agents he'd be leaving through a particular door or that she had any legal obligation to make sure the man exited in a particular way.
United States Code, Title 8, § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iii) (2023)
> (1)(A) Any person who
[…]
> (iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation;
[…]
> shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).
>attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien
Does that cover "Hey, this door is closer to where we are going"? It's going to rest on convincing a jury that the only possible reason the suspect would go out that door would be the judge explicitly trying to help them evade arrest.
IMO that should be impossible to prove but we have never taken "Beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously.
"knowing or in reckless disregard"
Funny, nobody ever arrests any of the employers choosing not to verify the documents of their employees.
There was a series of other steps in the case before she let the guy use a door the public never uses. Including rushing his case through after confronting the agents and adjourning it without notifying the attorneys present in the court room. She instructed him through the door before the basic administrative tasks of the case were done.
If the details of what their witness (court deputy) says is true then it's pretty obvious what happened here.
Whether the government should give State judges that leeway is another issue.
We really need a new HN. The fact that people will downvote your comment, which is literally 100% correct, simply because they want to believe a falsehood, is pretty sad. This isn't Hacker News, it's Delusion News.
Another possibility is for downvotes to be public, and then allow people to "filter out" downvoters who seem politically motivated (a personal list would be fine, I assume it's like 5 people). HN can't really survive in the year 2025 without some radical anti-politics technology.
The usual HN solution to this problem is to just flag purely political stories and not discuss politics.
I agree any system that ranks posts purely on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes isn't well equipped to handle discussions of controversial topics. Unless there's a strong culture of respecting dissenting opinions it inevitably just turns into an echo chamber for one side or the other. There needs to be some way to filter out votes motivated by ideology rather than post quality.
X's Community Notes has the right idea I think, in that its algorithm takes into account the ideological biases of the voters and ranks notes based on the overall consensus across multiple ideological perspectives rather than just on whichever ideological perspective has the greatest total number of votes. That's a lot harder to implement though.
> Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest.
Perhaps you’re a lawyer with greater insight into this issue than I have. The actions described in the article satisfy the plain reading of the terms “conceal, harbor, or shield from detection.”
The intuitive reading seems to be further corroborated by the case law:
> The word "harbor" […] means to lodge or to aid or to care for one who is secreting himself from the processes of the law. The word "conceal" […] means to hide or to secrete or to keep out of sight or to aid in preventing the discovery of one who is secreting himself from the processes of the law.
> *The statute proscribes acts calculated to obstruct the efforts of the authorities to effect arrest of the fugitive,* but it does not impose a duty on one who may be aware of the whereabouts of the fugitive, although having played no part in his flight, to reveal this information on pain of criminal prosecution.
The alien was already "detected", that's why they were at the courthouse. She didn't harbor him, she was performing her job and the defendant was required to be there.
I also fail to see how she "concealed" him either. "Aiding and abetting" would be a stretch, but still more accurate verbs. But those aren't in the law you quoted.
Original title: "Former New Mexico judge and wife arrested by ICE". It's as though he wasn't an active judge while harboring an alleged Tren De Aragua gang member.
Protip: believe absolutely nothing you read in mainstream news sources on any even remotely political topic. Read between the lines, sort of like people used to read Pravda in the Soviet Union.
This is why I don't believe 90% of what they say about Trump. As soon as he took office in 2017 it was so obvious that MSM was paid to absolutely destroy him. Then in 2021 suddenly everyone single problem wasn't due to the president anymore.
I woke up to this in 2016 when theretofore beloved public figure Donald Trump turned into literally Hitler immediately after he descended down that elevator in the Trump tower, all without changing a single opinion he'd ever held. And it's been unrelenting ever since.
and he was a former democrat! I'm not saying he's perfect, I'm not saying he's sophisticated, or that he hasn't said some stupid things. No way, there are way better republican candidates. But TDS is real.
What's being alleged is that she deliberately escorted the man out through an exit that is not usually made available to members of the public, instead of allowing him to leave through the regular door that would likely have put him right into the hands of ICE. If that was done with the intent of helping him evade arrest (which, if the story above is accurate, seems likely), it seems very reasonable to charge her with obstruction.
None of that is to say that what she did was morally wrong—often the law and morality are at odds.
You bring up an important point - laws and morality are not equivalent, and often differ. I wish people on HN would get that through their thick skulls and stop downvoting people for saying that a law was broken, if they think the law is invalid. The downvote button is not the ballot box where you vote on which laws you support.
An administrative warrant is still valid for arrest, it doesn't need to be signed by a judge. If you think it needs to be then laws needs to be changed, but that is how laws are right now.
It's not valid for arrest on private premises, like a courthouse. Only out in public.
So the judge is no more "obstructing justice" than if I refuse to open the door to let ICE agents in to arrest someone with an administrative warrant, and then that person leaves out the back door.
ICE should have obtained a judicial warrant, but they didn't. That's their fault.
