Dugan’s No Hero

Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is on trial this week for helping an illegal immigrant escape — briefly — arrest by ICE. I don’t know if she’ll be convicted or not and even if she is she’s likely to get a light sentence.

That’s appropriate because Dugan should never have been criminally prosecuted in the first place. What she did showed horrible judgement and was probably a violation of the judicial code of conduct. She should have been disciplined through the normal process for dealing with judges who mess up.

But some on the left want to portray Dugan as some sort of hero. She is not. What she did was unbecoming of a judge. Her job is to fairly administer the law regardless of her personal views. I’m not crazy about Donald Trump’s policy of mass deportations either. And the way it’s being carried out in some cases, with masked men showing up in the dead of night, figuratively if not literally, is as un-American as it gets.

Still, that’s no excuse for how she acted. Like it or not, the person in an unrelated case before her was, in fact, in the country illegally. And ICE was within its legal right to apprehend him in the corridor outside her courtroom. If we don’t like the policy then let’s vote against Republicans who enable Trump. I’ll certainly do that at every opportunity.

But let’s not make a hero out of a loose canon like Dugan. If she’s not convicted here then her case should be taken up by the state Supreme Court and appropriate sanctions should be applied. And if she runs again, Milwaukee County voters should weigh this before they vote for her again.