The fine for helping a person wanted by federal immigration agents slip out of a courthouse and avoid arrest is $5,000. No jail time. No loss of pension. No supervised release.
That's if you're a judge. If you're anyone else, it's called obstruction, and you go to prison.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was sentenced Tuesday for helping an illegal immigrant escape from her Wisconsin courtroom during an ICE enforcement operation in April 2025. Federal prosecutors had asked for jail time. Her defense attorneys asked for "time served" — which, given that she was never incarcerated, meant nothing. District Judge Lynn Adelman split the difference by handing down a $5,000 fine and calling it a day.
Judge Adelman's rationale was revealing. "An otherwise good person, upset by immigration enforcement in this country — a view widely shared — made a bad decision in the moment," he said. Imagine using that defense for literally any other crime. An otherwise good person, upset by tax policy, shredded their W-2s. An otherwise good person, upset by speed limits, did 95 in a school zone. See how fast the sympathy evaporates when you're not wearing a robe.
Adelman added that "the punishment should fit the offender and not merely the crime." Which is a remarkable thing for a federal judge to say out loud. The punishment should fit the offender. Write that one down. We'll need it the next time someone without a law degree and a Democratic nomination tries it.
Judge Adelman himself is a former Democratic Speaker of the Wisconsin state legislature, nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997. So a Clinton-appointed Democratic judge sentenced a Democratic judge to a fine that wouldn't cover a month's car payment. The system works — for the people inside it.
Dugan, for her part, offered the kind of statement that only plays well inside a courtroom full of sympathizers. "I have been cast as both a scofflaw and as a hero," she said. "I am a public servant who was just trying to do my job." Her job, of course, is to uphold the law. Not to personally decide which federal enforcement actions she'll tolerate in her courtroom and which ones she'll sabotage.
She then quoted Abraham Lincoln: "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work." Lincoln was talking about preserving the Union at Gettysburg. Dugan was talking about helping someone dodge a federal immigration warrant. The comparison is instructive, though probably not in the way she intended.
Her attorney, Jason Luczak, announced that Dugan is appealing the conviction. "We look forward to presenting the arguments that we think were right all along," Luczak said, adding that he believes "the appellate process will play out and we will be successful." So the strategy isn't contrition. It's vindication. She didn't just break the law — she thinks the law was wrong to apply to her.
The federal obstruction statute exists because the justice system can't function if individual judges get to decide which warrants they'll honor and which ones they'll actively undermine. That's not judicial discretion. That's a judge substituting her policy preferences for federal law and using her position to physically obstruct an arrest.
Prosecutors asked for incarceration. A judge who took an oath to uphold the law used her courtroom to obstruct federal agents executing a lawful warrant. And the sentence is a fine that amounts to about two days of her salary.
The phrase Adelman used — "the punishment should fit the offender" — is the whole story. Not the crime. The offender. What she did matters less than who she is.