During Donald Trump’s first term in office, Democrats unofficially adopted “The Resistance” to describe their collective efforts to resist and encourage everyone else to resist President Trump’s political agenda by nearly any means necessary.
The “Resistance” has been very active so far in Trump’s second term as well, with members of the Wisconsin judiciary seemingly now joining the fight.
Last Friday, Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee County Circuit judge, was arrested by the FBI over two alleged U.S Code violations: “Obstructing or impeding proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.”
Witnesses said that in mid-April, Dugan helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal immigrant, evade an arrest from ICE. The judge allegedly steered the defendant and his attorney out of her courtroom, where Flores-Ruiz was for a pretrial hearing on misdemeanor battery charges, through the jury doorway instead of the main courtroom door, where members of ICE waited outside for his hearing to conclude.
Though Dugan is now out on bond, her arrest for allegedly obstructing an ICE arrest has Resistance Democrats in Congress — who have been fond of saying over the last eight years that “no one is above the law” — accusing the Trump administration of “authoritarianism” and undermining “our system of checks and balances.”
In an equally disturbing development, another Wisconsin judge appears to have gone the Resistance route in response to the Dugan incident.
According to the Wisconsin Right Now website, Sawyer County Circuit Judge Monica Isham wrote an email to all Wisconsin state judges on Saturday, standing in solidarity with Dugan and threatening not to hold court until further guidance was given on the matter. She also said she would not comply with ICE arrest orders, calling their detention centers “concentration camps.”
“I have no intention of allowing anyone to be taken out of my courtroom by ICE and sent to a concentration camp, especially without due process, as BOTH of the constitutions we swore to support requires,” Isham wrote. “Should I start raising bail money?”
“Concentration camps” is a term that woke, anti-Trump members of Congress used in 2019 to describe detention centers at the southern border.
“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) proclaimed in June 2019.
“The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the ‘Home of the Free’ is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it,” she also said.
Clearly, this wasn’t merely a procedural request on Isham’s part. It’s about ideological disagreement with Trump’s illegal immigration policy, and like other Resistance members, she’s willing to be arrested to try and make a point.
“If this costs me my job or gets me arrested then at least I know I did the right thing,” Isham wrote in the conclusion of her letter.
While this is not the first time a judge has tried to do end runs around the rule of law over policy disagreements, and it won’t be the last, it’s deeply troubling, but not surprising, to see so many Democrats on board.
In fact, Democrats seem hellbent on repeating the exact same mistakes on illegal immigration that helped get them trounced in 2024. While I’m not one to stand in the way of the opposition when they’re self-destructing, it just boggles the mind that they continue to believe this is a winning issue despite the horrible optics.
You’re doing a great job, Democrats. Yep. Keep it up.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
