Adam Serwer writes:

The arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan over allegedly obstructing the apprehension of an undocumented immigrant is an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. You can just ask Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” Bondi told Fox News, commenting on Dugan’s arrest. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We are sending a very strong message today: If you are harboring a fugitive, we don’t care who you are. If you are helping hide one, if you are giving a [gang] member guns, anyone who is illegally in this country, we will come after you, and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

Bondi might have easily stuck to the specifics of Dugan’s case, insisting that her behavior was particularly egregious, and that Dugan’s indictment was about her individual conduct and not the judiciary as a whole. Indeed, in 2019, that’s precisely what the Donald Trump–appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling did in a similar case, when a Massachusetts judge, Shelley Joseph, was indicted for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant escape. But Bondi chose to do the opposite, implying that Dugan’s indictment was an attempt to intimidate the judiciary itself. The “message” is that judges who anger the administration will be prosecuted at Trump’s whim.

“The courts have a role in our constitutional system that they can only preserve if there’s an independent judiciary—that is to say, judges are free to judge make decisions without intimidation, without interference from the executive branch or the legislative for that matter,” Geraldine Hines, a retired Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, told me. “This kind of prosecution is, in my view, and in the view of many of us who no longer sit on the bench, an effort to intimidate judges from playing their part in the constitutional order.”

Why would the Trump administration feel the need to do this? The courts have not been as easily intimidated as Congress by Trump’s attempts to consolidate his presidency into an authoritarian regime unbound by the Constitution and the rule of law. In his first term, Trump succeeded in appointing dozens of right-leaning judges, but this administration’s claims of power have been so broad and lawless that they’ve drawn rebukes from conservative jurists as well as liberal ones. Trump officials like to say that “radical leftist judges” are obstructing the administration’s agenda. But when Trump asserted that the administration could exile people to a notorious prison in El Salvador and the courts were powerless to interfere, a Republican appointee, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote that this was “a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.” Yesterday, Judge Terry Doughty, a far-right jurist Trump himself appointed, rebuked the Trump administration after discovering that ICE had recently deported a 2-year-old American citizen and her family to Honduras. Doughty set a May hearing “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” [Continue reading…]