By Rich Lowry
Thursday, May 01, 2025
Judge Hannah Dugan surely believes she was acting
righteously when she allegedly secreted an illegal alien out of her courtroom
to evade capture by federal authorities.
Her subsequent arrest on obstruction charges makes the
jurist a martyr for progressive sanctuary policies that the Trump
administration seeks to punish and defeat.
This isn’t just a fight over immigration policy and
between federal authority on the one hand and state and local authority on the
other; it is a moral struggle over the legitimacy of immigration enforcement.
The supporters of sanctuary policies act as though they
are the equivalent of the antebellum resistors to the Federal Slave Act,
bravely defying federal authority, engaging in subterfuge to protect targeted
people, and using every legal recourse at their disposal.
After Judge Dugan’s arrest, an opinion piece in the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel made this point explicitly. It compared Dugan’s effort to
keep an illegal alien from federal officers to the abolitionist crowd that
saved an escaped slave living in Racine, Wis., from federal marshals seeking to
return him to bondage.
In the first Trump administration, the progressive writer
Harold Meyerson also discerned echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in Trump’s
immigration enforcement:
Now, as then, one part of the
country (President Trump’s disproportionately rural, white nationalist base)
has enlisted federal power to enforce a legal regime in a different part of the
country (racially diverse, immigrant-heavy cities) that views the law as
morally repulsive and destructive of the social fabric.
Just as the slave catchers argued,
speciously, that freed Negroes imperiled the antebellum North, today’s
anti-immigrant forces, beginning with Trump, argue that immigrants pose a
threat to public safety, though crime has fallen precipitously during the past
quarter-century.
The only “crime” that most
undocumented immigrants have committed—and the only one that places them in
federal legal jeopardy — is that of being undocumented. Likewise, the only
“crime” that most escaped slaves had committed — and the only one that placed
them in federal legal jeopardy — was escaping.
And in yet another rhyme, cities
and states are fighting back. Police are enjoined from cooperating with ICE.
Citizens groups have formed rapid response teams to support apprehended
immigrants and, when they have reason to believe raids are imminent, send out a
warning.
This is almost as lunatic as the frequent comparisons of
Trump to Hitler.
Needless to say, fugitive slaves (or their forebears)
didn’t come here of their own volition to get a better job than the ones they
had in their native lands. They were kidnapped, sold, and held in bondage,
before taking enormous risks to try to gain their freedom.
Illegally entering the United States to earn more money
in better conditions than back home obviously bears no relation to the
transatlantic slave trade or chattel slavery.
The Fugitive Slave Act comparison, though, speaks of the
worldview that informs progressive support for open-border policies. Just as
slaves had a moral right to be free in the North no matter what morally
bankrupt federal laws said, so illegal aliens have a moral right to be
in the United States.
This is why Joe Biden blew up the border — it wasn’t so
much a cynical play for future voters as an act of misbegotten principle,
opening the country to people we supposedly had no business excluding.
And if we can’t keep them from coming in, it’s even worse
to make them leave. Hence, sanctuary resistance to enforcement of our
immigration laws.
But nations have an inherent right to defend their
borders and determine who is admitted and excluded, whereas no one has an
inherent right to own another human being. Reasonable people can disagree about
immigration policy, and there is an open, democratic process for determining
the rules. These laws can be — and, of course, have been —changed in response
to the public will.
By subverting the enforcement of the law, sanctuary
jurisdictions — and judges — are committing an offense against democracy
itself.
They also aren’t, as they imagine, protecting innocent
victims. Put aside the notion that an illegal alien’s only offense is being
“undocumented” (the reality is that living and working here often involves
other offenses), the fact is that once sanctuary jurisdictions are keeping
illegal aliens from federal detention, the immigrants are entangled with the
criminal-justice system in other ways.
The illegal alien assisted by Judge Dugan is a case in
point. He’d already been deported once, and had reentered the United States
again, a felony. He was in the courtroom on three criminal charges of battery,
domestic abuse, and infliction of physical pain or injury. If he were a model
noncitizen, Judge Dugan wouldn’t have encountered him in the first place.
Rendering aid to a lawbreaker and potential threat to
others is a travesty, no matter what morality play Judge Dugan may have thought
she was enacting.
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