1) knowledge of a government proceeding
2) action with intent to interfere with that proceeding
It doesn't especially matter in this case whether ICE was entitled to enter the courtroom because she's not being charged for refusing to allow them entry to the room. The allegation is that upon finding out about their warrant she canceled the hearing and led the defendant out a door that he would not customarily use. Allegedly she did so with the intent of helping him to avoid the officers she knew were there to arrest him.
The government has to prove intent here, which as some have noted is difficult, but if the facts as recounted in the news stories are all true it doesn't seem that it would be overwhelmingly difficult to prove that she intentionally took action (2) to thwart an arrest that she knew was imminent (1).
She is brave. I suspect we will look back on this one day if it goes that far. Even if you are staunch anti-immigration advocate, I would ask everyone to do the mental exercise of how one should proceed if the law or the enforcement of it is inhumane. The immigrant in question went for a non-immigration hearing, so this judge was brave (that's the only way I'll describe it). Few of us would have the courage to do that even for clear cut injustices, we'd sit back and go "well what can I do?". Bear witness, this is how.
Frontpage of /r/law:
ICE Can Now Enter Your Home Without a Warrant to Look for Migrants, DOJ Memo Says
https://dailyboulder.com/ice-can-now-enter-your-home-without...
This headline is deliberately inaccurate, as acknowledged within the article. It intentionally implies that any migrants are enough to qualify, but the memo is actually targeting a very specific gang:
> The gang in question is Tren de Aragua, a group the Trump administration recently labeled a foreign terrorist organization. But legal experts say this is no justification for shredding the Constitution.
They're correct that this is still extremely problematic, but that's no justification for shredding journalistic integrity.
I'm not arguing that any of this we're discussing is good or even not absolutely terrible, but there's a strong tendency in the current climate to overstate how bad things are. This is entirely unnecessary and actively counterproductive. Things are plenty bad as it is, we do not need to go around exaggerating the offenses committed by the Trump administration. Reporting things exactly as they are is plenty damning, and lying and exaggerating will just burn political and social capital totally unnecessarily.
They're already accusing random people of gang membership arbitrarily you pig fuck.
They have made it clear how they are treating immigrants is how they want to treat citizens.
If you think the citizens they are targeting are "the bad ones", you just wait. Soon the "bad ones" category will get wider was well.
Someone wrote a poem about this once. Their back story is very, very relevant.
With that said, do you believe the Patriot Act was used only for terrorists?
Great little scene from The Departed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAKPWaJPR0Y
Gangs and Terrorists are bad, but I believe we as a country went through this once already and you cannot create these precedents because they stick around. They're literally reusing Guantanamo Bay.
USA is an exception here where local authorities doesn't govern immigration laws so you get "sanctuary cities", in almost every other country this sort of thing doesn't happen so illegal immigrants just get arrested and deported.
many minorities otherwise here legally are also being persecuted
Can you name one minority group that is being persecuted and have to hide? If you mean people critical of Trump then that is not a minority group, at least not in this context. It is wrong to deport them for that, but that isn't the same as "hunting down minorities".
Sure: Immigrants.
Also: International students, especially Palestinians who support their friends and family in Palestine.
To me, part of the issue here is that judges are "officers of the court" with certain implied duties about furthering the proper administration of justice. If the defendant had been appearing in her courtroom that day in a matter regarding his immigration status, the judge's actions could arguably be in support of the judicial process (ie if the defendant is deported before she can rule on his deportability that impedes the administration of justice). But since he was appearing on an unrelated domestic violence case, that argument can't apply here. Hence, this appears to be, at best, a messy, unclear case and, at worst, pretty open and shut.
Separately, ICE choosing to arrest the judge at the courthouse instead of doing a pre-arranged surrender and booking, appears to be aggressive showboating that's unfortunate and, generally, a bad look for the U.S. government, U.S. judicial system AND the current administration.
You are taking ICE's/the administration's perspective and assuming it is cogent which leads you to conclusion that doesn't support justice and instead supports the end of constitutional rule in the US.
The administration is in open violation of supreme court rulings and the law. They have repeatedly shown contempt for the constitution. They have repeatedly assumed their own supremacy. People responsible for enforcement are out of sync with those responsible for due process and legal interpretation. That is true crisis. These words are simple, but the emotional impact should be chilling. When considering the actions of the ICE agents, it seems very reasonable that aiding or abetting them would be an even greater obstruction of justice if not directly aiding and abetting illegal activity.
America is being confronted with a very serious problem. What happens when those responsible for enforcing the law break it or start enforcing "alternative" law? If the police are breaking the law, then there is no law, there is only power. Law is just words on paper without enforcement.
If the idea sounds farfetched, imagine if KKK members deciding to become police officers and how that changes the subjective experience of law by citizens compared to what law says on paper. Imagine they decide to become judges to. How would you expect that to pervert justice?
No I'm not. I'm taking the facts as they're presented by the AP (which is famously not sympathetic to this administration) and saying that nothing in the facts that I'm seeing here in this specific case serves as evidence of a constitutional crisis. This is a straightforward case of obstruction: either she did the things that are alleged or she didn't. If she did, it's obstruction regardless of who is in the White House, and we have no reason to believe at this time that she didn't!
We have better litmus tests, better evidence of wrongdoing by the administration, and better cases to get up in arms about. If we choose our martyrs carelessly we're wasting political capital that could be spent showing those still on the fence the many actual, straightforward cases of overreach.
There was a similar case in Massachusetts many years back. It never went to trial, and legal analysis could go both ways. The bargain struct was it would go into secretive judicial oversight channels.
There is a strong case to be made for obstruction of justice, and an equally strong case to be made about her making an error in her professional capacity as a judge and a government employee (which grants a level of immunity). Police officers, judges, soldiers, etc. make mistakes, but they generally don't go to jail for them because (even corruption aside) everyone makes mistakes. In some jobs, mistakes can and do have severe consequences up to and including people dying. If that led to prison, no one sane would take those jobs.
In any sane universe, it'd be fair to say she screwed up, and then the FBI also screwed up arresting her. I think the FBI screwed up more, since their mistake was premeditated, whereas she was put on the spot.
I do agree with your fundamental point of fatigue. This is not something anyone has a moral high ground to hang their flag on without looking bad.
Fox News perspective is that she broke court procedures in order to obstruct federal agents.
Prior cases seem to support that:
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/massachusetts-judge-court-...
Case concluded with some kind of judicial reprimand (not criminal, but administrative). This one is further over the line.
Neutral description to LLM also supports that the judge acted improperly (but LLM didn't think this would lead to a conviction). LLMs aren't great at legal analysis, but are actually pretty good at pattern-matching cases.
One thing helpful to have is a lawful plan. The courthouse might have handled ICE without breaking protocols by having protocols. Protocols should be prima facie neutral, but it's reasonable to expect people in courts, schools, and other places we actually want them to show up to feel safe there. That shouldn't involve sneaking people through back doors or hiding them in jury areas.
ICE has been regularly overstepping its bounds and going after people in ways that impact our legal system's ability to function. This is a terrible precedent to set for no other reason than it impacts the rule of law. If people who are accused of crimes can be disappeared without a trial, just for showing up to court, what incentive is there for anyone to go to court? They are literally ignoring the "innocent until proven guilty" that is critical to the rule of law.
If you take away people's ability to get justice within the system, you are making it inevitable that they will go outside the system to get justice.
We can agree with what the judge did, but it doesn't make it legal.
We can also agree that ICE is breaking laws, but it also doesn't make what the judge did legal. It does help a bit -- in another comment I explained why -- but not enough to change the legal analysis.
As a footnote, modern LLMs aren't worse than Fox News. They have a lot of case law in their training set. They make mistakes so shouldn't yet be used for anything critical, but the legal analysis from Claude or GPT4.1 is a lot better than e.g. 95% of forum posts here.
It might be a mistake to beat someone bloody, but it isn't an accident.
Let's say I beat someone bloody. We can play through several scenarios:
- Someone broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life
- Plain clothes police broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life
Let's say a police officer did so:
- Someone was a gang member, and the police officer did so in self-defense
- Ditto, based on mistaken beliefs
A lot of the protections in place for police and judges are based on the fact that mistakes like these happen. In general, people aren't individually liable for mistakes make in their official capacity as a government employee, unless they cross very extreme lines. They might get fired, but not prosecuted.
There are exceptions (such as handling of classified materials), but as a guideline, if a police officer beats someone bloody, but has good reason to believe they were a criminal and that this was the least force they could use to keep themselves safe, they're protected even if they're wrong.
I understand that honest mistakes happen due to inaccurate information, understand, ect.
- e.g. you thought a cop was a burglar.
These are different from poor and regrettable choices, also sometimes referred to as "mistakes".
- I beat my wife because I caught them cheating.
1) I walked in. An argument and a fight ensued.
2) I found out about it, went of and thought, and made the choice.
There's a hierarchy, including:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense
I find it entirely probable that the judge didn't know or understand, in the moment, their situation and the implications of their actions. Indeed, I will go one step further. If ICE does illegal things 100 times, then it's reasonable to expect an unreasonable reaction maybe 10% of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause
If I were a judge, and someone came into court with an "administrative warrant," I might not want them disturbing my courthouse either. I might want parties to feel safe there, and be concerned about miscarriages of justice if parties are scared to show up.
1) I walked in. An argument and a fight ensued.
2) I found out about it, went of and thought, and made the choice.
There's a hierarchy, including:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_(law)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense
I find it entirely probable that the judge didn't know or understand, in the moment, their situation and the implications of their actions. Indeed, I will go one step further. If ICE does illegal things 100 times, then it's reasonable to expect an unreasonable reaction maybe 10% of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause
If I were a judge, and someone came into court with an "administrative warrant," I might not want them disturbing my courthouse either. I might want parties to feel safe there, and be concerned about miscarriages of justice if parties are scared to show up.
The trick here is to have policies ahead-of-time, and especially, to let judges know about this sort of thing ahead-of-time. If police show up at my door, I might make a mistake. If they let me know ahead of time, and I have time to think, I hopefully won't.
this is not the standard of guilt and i think you know that
i also think you know that this is merely the latest incident in an extended, obvious campaign to override the judiciary.
There are so many cases where the Trump administration has flagrantly violated rule of law. Why would we waste time fighting them in the court of public opinion on a case where things currently appear to be open and shut in the other direction?
When those on the fence see us getting up in arms about something where to all appearances the "victim" actually did break the law and is being given due process, we lose credibility. If we instead save our breath for the many many cases that actually have compelling facts, it's harder for them to tune us out.
In ux design this is called alert fatigue, and it matters in politics too.
those cases are the least important to the defense of due process rights. but i'll concede that you're likely correct at the level of the broader populace given that our civic education is an embarrassment and has been for decades.
Verification of claims is extremely rare. Especially for breaking news like this.
I haven’t gone down this rabbit hole. But reporters mostly just recite interviews.
The world has a concept that fits that description and it is a civil war. People pick up arms, a lot of people get killed, several generations end up in cycles of violence.
That is what happen when there is no law, only power, and people act on it.
Here's an excerpt from They Thought They Were Free, a book about the mindset of ordinary Germans experiencing the rise of the Nazi Government:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
...
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
March 31, 2025: "Democrats’ approval remains at low point: Poll" - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/5224072-de...
April 4, 2025: "President Donald Trump's approval rating has risen by 5 percentage points among Democrats, according to new polling" - https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update...
So how is all the raucous handwringing helping?
NYT (Apr 23, 2025): "Trump’s Approval Rating Has Been Falling Steadily, Polling Average Shows" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/us/politics/trump-approva...
> Newsweek (Apr 25, 2025): "President Donald Trump's approval rating on immigration is steadily declining, according to numerous polls." https://www.newsweek.com/trump-approval-rating-immigration-f...
Pew Research (April 23, 2025): "Trump’s Job Rating Drops, Key Policies Draw Majority Disapproval as He Nears 100 Days" https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/04/23/trumps-job-r...
Trump just started his term, but it doesn’t seem to be the incremental approach allegedly used by the Nazis.
He is, to quote his former advisor, “flooding the zone with sh*t.” A gigantic burst of terribleness, doing a thousand things at once, leaving everyone disoriented.
That’s quite different from the “every day a little worse approach.”
I suspect the next four years will be gigantic bursts of terribleness, followed by long periods of relief it wasn’t “as bad as it seeemed at first.”
There is no moment of egregious violation. It never comes. Even when the state is clearly totalitarian there were Germans holding out hope that Germany would lose the war. As if that was their final straw.
The salami is purposefully sliced thin enough that one slice on it's own will never provoke enough outrage. How do you hope to oppose that?
Why re-use a strategy that, when we tried it, led to Nazi Germany? Do we expect it to succeed this time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_the_Formation_of_P...
You want to have all the political capital left when that law happens, instead of wasting it defending rotten scraps. Wasting so much energy and political capacity on scraps means there is no energy left when the big things hits, that is exactly where your current strategy is taking you.
> Why re-use a strategy that, when we tried it, led to Nazi Germany? Do we expect it to succeed this time?
People killed Nazis before they came to power, they weren't using legal or nice strategies as defense back then either. That was the wrong way, it only increased support for the Nazis.
We should hold back, let the authoritarians do their thing, until there is critical support against an authoritarian power grab and then act when we have overwhelming strength?
Don't fight back when the terrain favors your enemy even if it is your land, you fight where you can win. War isn't won by who holds the most land, but by who defeats the enemy troops. You need to build support from the people, not do things that lose support.
And no, even the people who watches Fox News do not want USA to become a fascist state, they like their democracy.
It happened in Germany and could happen in USA.
They absolutely do not. We know that.
They are cultists. They will cut off their own foot if it means a "lib" loses his leg.
I find that both right and left media tend to say the same things about the other side. It's a bit wild when you first realize it, when you hear your exact arguments about the others being said by the others about you.
Finding common ground is always the best path. Determine where the actual differences are beyond the meme propaganda, and you may be able to better connect with other world views.
The left tends to be more likely to be correct, however (speaking as someone who identifies with neither.) This isn't a matter of opinion; polls have repeatedly found that Fox News viewers, for example, are less well-informed than people who consume no news at all.
"BSAB" thinking doesn't work. No good reasons remain for pretending that it does. One side is objectively and consistently bad for America... but they are better at herding dull-witted people to the polls, so they are winning.
But detachment isn’t a moral stance; it’s a luxury belief from a world where the system mostly worked. Today, one side has abandoned the rules entirely. Neutrality isn't wisdom anymore. Neutrality is abdication.
"Both sides are bad" was an optimization for an environment that doesn't exist anymore: shared facts, rational actors, institutional guardrails. We live in the failure modes now: information war, procedural collapse, manufactured resentment.
We aren't floating above it. We’re being crushed by it. And the longer we cling to detached cleverness, the more we surrender to people who act without waiting for certainty.
Yes, action without clarity is dangerous. Yes, there are wrong moves that make collapse worse. But paralysis, waiting, hoping, optimizing forever for a world that already ended kills just the same. It only feels cleaner on the way down.
They already moved. We're still here, swirling the last drops of neutrality in our glasses, mistaking abdication for wisdom, even as the last undergirders of the state give way beneath us.
I also see lunacy in terms of economic policies, especially those pushed by progressives like AOC. The party seems a bit too socialist for me, though I appreciate the push for individual liberties when they embrace more classically liberal positions.
January 6, and Trump's subsequent pardon of the rioters, cost you every last drop of the moral authority you need in order to say things like that.
Yes, there is lunacy on the left that does not sleep... but at least their breed of idiot means well. Historically, when you pit the misguided motivations of an AOC against the active malevolence of a Trump, the latter usually beat the former handily. And as usual, when elephants fight, the mice get trampled.
I don't think Jan 6 was good in the slightest. Idiots idioting. But at least those idiots were idioting against federal property and not the property of private citizens - again, both are very bad and inexcusable in my book; I'm just clarifying why I didn't include Jan 6.
Thank you for the insightful discussion.
Really big conditional. A huge amount love fascism, in terms of sharing the same values and desires. How can they resist the allure: "we'll give you everything you want, and you won't even have to work for it by convincing others you're right, because we'll crush those who oppose us".
As long as they believe they'll always be the ones in power (see the crushing dissent part), they see that as a dream come true. Just look at how conservatives have openly opposed due process and judicial checks and balances over the executive branch lately*.
* – Which country am I discussing here? Could be a few lately!
"Don't struggle -- only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."
If fighting back helps your enemy, don't just pause and not fight back. Change the state of the system so that the most effective thing -- fighting back -- is viable.
Get inside their OODA loop. Change the rhythm of things so that it suits your needs and not theirs.
That law was enacted after they thought they had the power to do it, not before as with every salami slicing action. If they think there will be a response, they back off while they continue to slice.
You talk about political capital like it's in a bank account just waiting to be spent, while political capital is being lost through inaction itself, especially in people seeing that it's more rational to run than fight.
Schumer's strategy to wait for 40% unpopularity didn't save any political capital, just the opposite, it demoralized everyone on his side, destroyed resolve, and shattered solidarity.
What is the difference between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_the_Formation_of_P... and https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/trump-actblu...
Intent is already declared, time passes which allows power to consolidate. When would it be easier to act, after several months of power consolidation?
You are crazy if you don't see the difference...
It's not a difference in goal, it's a difference in level of power consolidation. They would already have enacted that law if they thought they had the power to do it, the fact that they haven't means that they think it would cause a response they couldn't win against. As soon as they think they can win, they will do it.
So by not acting now, you ensure that that law is a possibility later.
What do you mean "act now"? Do you want more people to go out and key tesla cars? You think that is going to make fascism less likely? No, stuff like that only strengthens fascism.
People fought Hitler at every turn in his rise to power often using less than legal means and violence, that only made him stronger.
> Imagine I have a neighboring country who's land I want. They have 10,000 citizens, but I only have 5,000 bullets. I have a bullet factory that produces 1,000 bullets a month. Do I invade them right now or do I wait at least 5 months?
Except that country is selling you the bullets, and they say they need to produce more bullets to win even though you just buy them.
My advice: Stop selling bullets to your enemy.
Your response: But they have so many bullets, we need to make more to defend ourselves, and of course we can't stop selling bullets since that will crash our market!
Like, each of those positions are fine in themselves, but the combination is devastating.
If I didn't believe in you then I wouldn't explain these things, I do it since I think things can change for the better.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...
So we can conclude that all that disparagement of Trump increases his support, or why else would it increase so much? The main thing that decreases support for Trump is when Trump does things like the tariffs, or all the insane stuff he has done so far.
Approval dropping a bit due to Trump doing insane things isn't thanks to Democrats, that is his own fault. You want them to shoot them in the foot like that, like press hard on the insane tariffs etc, don't press on these issues where it is easy to defend him.
Depending on which poll series you look at, it's at or a little below his support an equal time into his first term and either following a similar trajectory or dropping faster. It's true that it is still above most of the rest of his first term because his support dropped throughout the term, and it is a quarter of a year into a four year term.
> So we can conclude that all that disparagement of Trump increases his support, or why else would it increase so much?
It increased, insofar as it did, only when he was out of office. What seems to increase his support is him not having his hands on the levers of power.
Building a personal army and pissing in the woods whilst you drill and prepare for civil war 2.0 electric boogaloo would be an overreaction, this is a strongly worded letter against arresting judges. This is the absolute minimum anyone could possibly be expected to do.
The point of that excerpt is that there is not and likely will never be one single unifying objectionable action that provokes people into acting and we will slow walk our way into atrocity through inaction.
The argument being made is that it will continually get worse every single day. Every action will slowly become more egregious. A judge arrested politically, but for cause, today will be a judge arrested without cause tomorrow, but we will have adapted to see judges being arrested for blatantly political reasons as a new norm.
The facts and nuance will change faster than we can adapt and while we pontificate on whether this is the one that's worth it, the next bad thing will have already happened. More power will have been consolidated.
Taking in the truth requires action, so anything that lets people stay in denial or bury their heads is clung to in order to protect mental health. Eventually it will be too late, and you will wonder when you should have acted knowing you are no longer able to.
So all I am saying, stop hurting yourself, that only help your enemies. It is not me hurting you, it is you hurting you. This was how the Democrats lost the election, it wasn't Trump that won it was Democrats that lost it by hurting themselves over and over.
In the face of obvious fascism those who would be "turned against" their fellows by dint of honest and justified alarm are already "against" them now. They can only be opposed not convinced. They are either honest villains or live virtually entirely in their fantasy wholly disconnected from reality.
But is this one of those situations? The problem I think people get stuck in the muck about is all these situations run together and they start assuming facts from one case apply to another.
Two things can be true— The Trump administration be in defiance of some other ruling related to immigration/deportation as well as being perfectly within the law for this particular case.
You have just described a lot of US policing
Dude used a different door so the FBI arrests a judge in a court room? At that point we should be charging ICE agents with kidnapping.
Technically all the government has to do is get her on a plane to El Salvador in the middle of the night.
Which is to say, this arm of government has not followed any semblance of due process so far, and is currently defying a unanimous order of the Supreme Court even in a Republican supermajority, pretending due process is something they "have to" do is very much ignoring where we are.
Just as I'm not obligated to call the police to report something I don't see how I can be obligated to force my guest to use a particular door for the convenience of the police. It isn't my responsibility to actively facilitate their actions.
It would never have occurred to me (and doesn't seem reasonable) that obstruction could involve indirect (relative to the government process) actions.
I could understand "aiding and abetting" if I was actively facilitating the commission of a crime but I don't want to live in a country where mere avoidance is considered a crime. "Arrested for resisting arrest" gets mocked for good reason.
If true, that's pretty clearly a deliberate attempt to obstruct their efforts. The only question is whether obstructing ICE is classified as the legal offense of obstruction, but I don't have any specific reason to believe it wouldn't be.
> The only question is whether obstructing ICE is classified as the legal offense of obstruction
An important one is "does ICE have the authority to operate in the location they were operating in?" If the answer is no, then Dugan's actions cannot be interpreted as interfering with ICE's official operations. You cannot interfere with official operations when the operations are not official or legal. An extreme example of this would be like police arresting somebody, and in a formal interrogation they admit to murder, but the person was not read their Miranda rights. These statements would likely be inadmissible in a court. But subtle details matter, like if the person wasn't arrested or if they weren't being interrogated (i.e. they just blabbed).
This matters because the warrant. In the affidavit it says Dugan asked if the officer had a judicial warrant and were told they had an administrative warrant.[0] That linked article suggests that an administrative warrant can only be executed in an area where there is no expectation of privacy. This is distinct from public. There are many public places where you do have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A common example being a public restroom (same law means people can't take photos of you going to the bathroom). So is there a reasonable expectation of privacy here? I don't know.
I think it is worth reading the affidavit. Certainly it justifies probable cause (at least from my naive understanding). But the legal code is similar to programming code in that subtle details are often critical to the output. That's why I'm saying it isn't "the only question", because we'd need to not only know the answers to the above but answers to more subtle details that likely are only known to domain experts (i.e. lawyers, judges, LEO, etc)
[0] https://www.motionlaw.com/the-difference-between-judicial-an...
> the director of the FBI posted
> showing a clear politically motivated bias in an ongoing case
[0] https://x.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/1915800907318468626
Archive in case gets deleted again[1]:
https://archive.is/20250425194646/https://x.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/1915800907318468626
[1] https://gizmodo.com/fbi-director-deletes-tweet-about-arrest-of-wisconsin-judge-but-its-unclear-why-2000594375No, this is a disaster. Hyperbole aside, this is indeed how democracy dies. Eventually this escalates to arresting more senior political enemies. And eventually the arbiter of whoever has the power to make and enforce those arrests ends up resting not with the elected government but in the law enforcement and military apparatus with the physical power to do so.
Once your regime is based on the use of force, you end up beholden to the users of force. Every time. We used to be special. We aren't now.
I think most of the weirdness comes from the fact that entering the country illegally, or remaining in the country illegally can be crimes, but they can also be civil offenses. “Civil” means no jail time, but people still get deported without going to criminal court.
“Civil” also means “doesn’t have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” and “no constitutional right to a public defender.” Immigration law tries to provide limited forms of some of those ideas. There’s a kind of bail system, and people have a right to be represented by attorneys, but no right for those attorneys to be paid by the government. There is somebody referred to as an immigration judge, and they have a federal job, but they aren’t regular federal judges.
It’s possible to appeal an immigration court’s decision to a federal district court to get into the legal system we’re more familiar with.
* https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11536
* https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12158
But about a month ago, the Court did rule people who the government wanted to send to El Salvador have a due process right to challenge that decision in regular federal court as a habeas corpus proceeding ( https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a931_2c83.pdf ). They later issued an order that the people covered by the original ruling cannot be deported based on the Alien Enemy Act until further notice ( https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/041925zr_c18... ).
No idea if he was one as she claimed the exact opposite of what she wrote on her GoFundMe donation page about how they needed money because he is such a great husband/father.
The allegation is that she obstructed an arrest by changing standard procedure, she wasn't arrested for obstructing search that part was fine.
The ICE agents were legally allowed to wait outside and arrest the man as he stepped out, the judge leading the man out the backdoor after she learned ICE agents were waiting at the front is very hard to defend as anything but obstruction of arrest.
Which sounds awfully novel to me. You really want to tear down the structure of democracy over this kind of nitpicking on "procedure"?
I remain horrified that people I really thought were normal Americans are willing to burn it all down just so they don't have to hear Spanish spoken in their doctor's office.
The GP (or GGP, I forget) was discussing very specific legal technical details surrounding the judge's actions, the nature of the warrant and permissible locations for serving the warrant. I was pretty interested in that discussion - even though I probably generally agree with your macro views on immigration policy. You chose to focus on something completely different, the overall aggregate outcomes of national political policies and jumped immediately to rhetoric like "tear down the structure of democracy".
IMHO, an important part of "the structure of democracy" is the rule of law. Ideally, that means equal, impartial, consistent enforcement of the laws as written. If the circumstances were changed to this being 1962 Alabama and the defendant being the Grand Wizard of the local KKK and the judge snuck him out the back door because RFK had sent FBI agents from Washington to serve a warrant arresting the KKK Grand Wizard - would you think those discussing whether that judge might have technically obstructed justice were equally "tearing down the structure of democracy?"
I would say you would actually destroy "democracy" if you enforced the rule of law.
Immigration was consistently polled as the most important issue to voters in the last US election.
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/27/immigration-americans-top-p...
>totally a discretionary thing
The example I posted about the KKK Grand Wizard being the judicially smuggled person was intended to demonstrate the grave danger of having enforcement of a law (in this case obstruction of justice) be "totally a discretionary thing." The same people who'd (hopefully) be "horrified" by a judge smuggling a KKK member away from law enforcement (pointy white hat and all), want to selectively give a hall pass to this judge for doing the same thing. Paraphrasing Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that's no basis to form a system of government.
> very much by democratic support.
If you're referring to elections, those are, at most, once every two years. I'm not sure how well cops are going to do their jobs with a two-year latency on "what crimes can we arrest people for today?" If you're referring to anything else, you're either endorsing mob rule (kinda the main reason 'rule of law' was invented back in Holy Grail times) or you're placing a lot of faith in "the current people in political, social and cultural power" always being exactly "the kind of righteous people who agree with me on everything important." Especially in light of recent events, I don't think that's a very solid governance plan either.
As a practical example, I'm kind of a wild-eyed radical on immigration. If I was anointed "King of the Land", I'd almost throw open the borders entirely to any and all comers (not quite, but pretty close). Of course, I'd also need to change some other things to make that work, but that's not important right now. And even though I'm that radical on immigration, back when some cities chose to become "Sanctuary Cities" by announcing the current elected officials had decided to just... stop doing their job of enforcing (some) laws - I wasn't happy like you might think. No, even though I liked the outcome in that one instance, it actually troubled me greatly that a handful of individuals elected in the public trust decided to unilaterally seize power by illegally subverting the constitution and their solemn oaths of office.
And the fact I felt that was very bad back then, even over something I generally agreed with, leaves me feeling like I'm on firm logical, ethical, legal and moral ground when it troubles me equally that Trump and his fellow travelers are abusing the public trust in, conceptually, the very same ways. If your support for "the rule of law" depends on who the current ruler is and whether they agree with your personal opinions. I think you're probably gonna have a bad time under any system of government that's not a monarchy or anarchy - with yourself as dictator for life.
On the other hand, I thought it was an incredibly dangerous and illegal expansion of presidential authority when Obama droned a U.S. citizen overseas without due process (even though that person was indeed an active terrorist). I'm funny that way about seizing power unconstitutionally. I'm always against it. No matter who does it or what they do with the stolen power. I hope those who are complaining today that Trump is using (and building on) the unconstitutional presidential power grab techniques that Obama pioneered, but didn't see a problem with it until someone they don't like started doing things they disagree with, are at least learning from this very hard lesson. Abuse of power is wrong no matter who does it or what they do.
> If your support for "the rule of law" depends on who the current ruler is and whether they agree with your personal opinions.
This Obama comparison seems like a false equivalence because you are ignoring the _where_, i.e. within the U.S. vs a foreign battlefield.
It's been a while but IIRC it was unconstitutional because the president cannot unilaterally execute a U.S. citizen anywhere without due process except under certain conditions, none of which were met in this case. It wasn't a declared war ("War on Terror" was a PR slogan, not a congressional declaration of war). I think the fact it was targeted specifically at a named person and there were no exigent circumstances (like trying to free hostages or stopping an eminent attack) were also factors. But, based on the plain wording, this wasn't a close or subjective call. To be clear, while it was illegal and unconstitutional, I don't personally think killing this guy was morally unjustified. He was a shithead who spouted anti-American, pro-terrorist crap online. But he was basically a poseur in a cave in Yemen. He was never a material terror threat to the U.S. other than making online videos. He claimed allegiance with real terrorists but they never took him seriously because he was a fucking American and they'd be stupid not to assume he was a double-agent.
You're not alone in assuming dropping a missile on this guy must have been legally okay because of the surrounding circumstances. I mean, that can't just... happen, right? The U.S. had already droned lots of non-U.S. citizen enemy combatants. The guy was clearly a wannabe terrorist calling for jihad against the great Satan America. He was awful and unsympathetic in every possible way. He was in a country (Yemen I think) that was fighting a declared insurrection-ish war against the local jihad group that sort-of associated with the guy. And that country was a U.S. ally. But... none of those circumstances made killing him legal. Yemen didn't launch the missile. A U.S. soldier under direct presidential order did. Legally and constitutionally, what Obama did was no different than Trump ordering U.S. soldiers to execute a U.S. citizen on the White House lawn with no due process. Except I highly doubt U.S. soldiers would do that without the surrounding circumstances of being a known terrorist, in Yemen, droned like they'd legally done before to similar non-U.S. citizen terrorists. Unfortunately, all of those circumstances were legally and constitutionally irrelevant. And, of course, even Trump would never give such an order because he knows American's sensibilities would be shocked, and both parties in congress would be forced to protest en masse, hold hearings, etc. But Obama and congress knew, in those circumstances, in that era, in that middle eastern country, against that unsympathetic target, it would encounter minimal protest. But it's at times like that and under circumstances like those that Rubicons get crossed and dangerous precedents set.
Sadly, that political calculation was correct. Despite being forcefully protested by a few members of congress, our system failed to work because the "War on Terror" was started by the opposition party and Obama's own party chose not to hold their President accountable for partisan political reasons. The media similarly followed party lines with the democratic majority choosing not to make an issue of it and the opposition media not wanting to go against the "War on Terror" they still actively endorsed. Only a few media people went against their traditional alignment and called it the unconstitutional execution that it clearly was. The handful of politicians, media and pundits who stood up on this issue despite doing so alone, are worth noting for their integrity. Even though they knew it might be politically costly and wouldn't change anything, they chose to stand on the right side of history in one of those rare moments when all others failed.
Calling people who are against illegal immigration "racist" just makes it worse.
A majority of people are fine with legal migration, a supermajority of people think illegal immigrants should get deported. So no, the issue most see isn't that they don't like Spanish, the issue is that they are here illegally.
an alarming number of legal aliens are being detained, deported or disappeared: students who wrote op-eds, Afghan asylees who helped us during the war, college professors and Canadian tourists, even (prospectively) "home-growns."
if most Trump supporters support legal migration, why aren't they pushing back on this?
Do that, and I'd have zero problems rounding up all of the remaining illegal immigrants and driving 'em into the ocean, if that's what you want. Instead, I'm suspicious that "the only issue is that they're here illegally" is just deflection.
The only solution to housing is building more housing.
https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/rep...
In Florida, Desantis is so against legal migration he is trying to relax child labor laws.
Even now there is a share of Republicans especially in southern states who are still against interracial marriages.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/interracial-marri...
This is a far shot from being against legal migration entirely.
Sure, its simply about preferring strong ethnic controls on immigration: while only 50% of Republicans think legal immigration should be decreased, 61% think that immigration "from other cultures" has mainly negative consequences. It's not that Republicans are against legal immigration entirely, its just that they are (in the majority) against any immigration from the places most immigrants come from; they are fine with legal immigration of white Christian conservatives, especially from the rest of the anglosphere.
I said majority of people, not majority of republicans. That means there are still many republicans that like legal immigration, wealthy people like when labor is allowed to immigrate, Elon Musk is one such person among many others.
If Trump said he would deport all the legal immigrants he would likely not have won the election, that they are illegal is core to his support.
Sorry, then would a janitor who puts up a slippery floor sign in front of a door and asks someone to use a different door be "obstructing arrest by changing standard procedure."
This is absurd on its face. You don't have the right to arrest a Judge for "obstructing justice" because they let someone use a different door to leave. And you should think 1 million times of the implication to the rule of law before you do such a thing.
ICE are not gods, and I would hope after this, that Americans would start to consider taking away what power they have, because they are abusing it. And it's threatening our democracy.
Oh. Do expand.
This why civil rights advocates say “don’t talk to the police.”
The allegations revolve around judge Dugan's actions. They allegedly cancelled the targets hearing and [directed] the them through a private back door to avoid arrest.
Edit: directed, not escorted.
According to the complaint [0] on page 11, Flores-Ruiz still ended up in a public hallway and was observed by one of the agents. They just didn't catch him before he was able to use the elevator.
INAL but I don't think "Dugan let Flores-Ruiz use a different door to get to the elevator than ICE expected" should be illegal.
[0]: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/3d022b74...
The first paragraph only appears to apply to physical evidence. The second paragraph appears to require more than merely assisting someone.
> Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication
The latter two obviously don't apply so that only leaves the former. Did the judge act "corruptly"?
The other law cited in the complaint is USC 18 §1071 [2] and the question would be if leading someone to an alternate pathway constitutes either harboring or concealing the individual. I don't feel like letting someone out my backdoor constitutes "concealing" a person as the term is commonly used. As an example, hiding someone in a closet and then telling the officers that he isn't in the building would obviously qualify.
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/3d022b74...
How do you prove intent? That her intent was to obstruct?
They point out in the article that such room (juror room) is never usually used by certain people, but that still doesn't prove anything about her intent.
It's not a given, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable burden of proof either.
If the only reason to use the backdoor is to avoid arrest, then that proves her intent. If there was another reason to use it then that will come up in court.
If I know you're in a building and haver permission to arrest you, it's not "obstructing arrest" if you use the back door. What if your car's parked out back?
To quote the 10 year old who destroyed me in fortnite "Get good."
False.
Like operating a non-conforming radio transmitter.
If my buddy is in my backyard blasting out Freebird 24x7 on a transmitter that can reach 201 feet instead of the unlicensed maximum of 200 feet and the FCC knocks on my door looking for him and I tell them to go fuck themselves, should I be arrested?
I don't know. Is an FCC warrant like an ICE warrant? If so, then you don't have to open the door. You can probably tell them to fuck themselves, but that's probably not a good idea.
You can't obstruct their investigation. You can't conceal what your neighbor is doing. You can't tell the FCC that your neighbor doesn't have a transmitter, or that it only reaches 200 feet when you know that that it reaches farther than that. Those are crimes, in my admittedly limited understanding of the situation.
An ICE warrant is not a search warrant. ICE did not need a search warrant in this case. They needed a warrant to arrest a named person they had probable cause to believe was in the country illegally. It appears they did in fact have that warrant. It was a real warrant. And if they facts in the ICE criminal complaint are true, this is a textbook case of someone obstructing that arrest.
The judge specifically clarified the type of warrant with the agents when she learned they were there. Then she escorted Ruiz out a path that she knew they could not legally be in.
The big distinction is that an administrative warrant does not authorize a search.
[1] https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/know-your-rights/know-your-r...
[2] https://www.nilc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-Subpoen...