A full jury was selected Thursday in federal court for the trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, who is set to face jurors next week for allegedly obstructing the arrest of an illegal immigrant before her court.
Dugan pleaded not guilty to two charges of obstruction earlier this year, after the Justice Department alleged she helped an illegal immigrant evade federal immigration officers who appeared at her court to arrest the illegal immigrant in April. Jury selection concluded after roughly six hours of questioning prospective jurors from eastern Wisconsin.
The 14 jurors selected included nine men and four women, according to local Milwaukee news station WITI. Two of the 14 jurors seated are alternates. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman had the jury sworn in, then called the court into recess until Monday at 9 a.m. local time, when the trial is slated to begin.
The Justice Department has said it expects to call 25 to 28 witnesses during the trial. Dugan’s lawyers had attempted to introduce statements Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel made about her case, but Adelman denied the request. Adelman did, however, permit Dugan’s lawyers to discuss other immigration arrests in the Milwaukee area as part of its defense during the trial.
The trial is scheduled to begin in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin with opening statements on Monday.
The indicted Milwaukee judge is accused of allowing Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal immigrant who appeared before her court, and his lawyer to exit her courtroom via a back door after federal immigration agents appeared at the courthouse to arrest him. Flores-Ruiz was arrested by federal authorities shortly after leaving the courthouse through the back door, while Dugan was arrested in a highly publicized fashion roughly a week later in April.
The trial was originally scheduled for July, but was postponed while Adelman considered Dugan’s claim that she had judicial immunity from the charges. Adelman, after receiving a recommendation from a magistrate judge, denied Dugan’s motion to dismiss and her claims of immunity from the claims.
“There is no basis for granting immunity simply because some of the allegations in the indictment describe conduct that could be considered ‘part of a judge’s job.’ As the magistrate judge noted, the same is true in the bribery prosecutions, concededly valid, where the judges were prosecuted for performing official acts intertwined with bribery,” Adelman wrote in his August ruling denying the motion.
Dugan was suspended from her duties as a Milwaukee County circuit judge by the Wisconsin Supreme Court shortly after she was federally charged earlier this year. Dugan’s charges have a maximum sentence of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine if convicted.
The high-profile case marks one of the ways the Trump administration has clashed with local courts’ attempts to curb immigration enforcement. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments in a case next year over the legality, under state law, of local jails holding illegal immigrants for federal officers to pick up.