April 25: Judges Arrested for Abetting Migrants
Trump to recognize Crimea as Russian territory; White South Africans seek asylum; Saudi Arabia arms package
The Big Story
As the Trump administration deals with the Supreme Court blocking its attempts to deport illegal migrants under the Alien Enemies Act, it appears that some judges are assisting migrants—even those with criminal histories—in more irregular, and allegedly illicit, ways. Since yesterday, two judges, one current and one former, have been arrested by the FBI for either facilitating migrants’ evasion of arrest or harboring them at home (yes, you read that correctly.)
On Friday morning, federal agents arrested Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan on obstruction charges, according to NBC News. FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrest in a now-deleted post on X. The FBI hasn’t clarified why the post was deleted.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the FBI was investigating Dugan’s conduct regarding an attempted ICE arrest at her courthouse on April 18. Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service, confirmed to CNN that Dugan was arrested on courthouse grounds.
Several Democratic representatives expressed outrage at what they view as a significant escalation in President Trump’s efforts to consolidate power and use federal law enforcement to eliminate legal obstacles, according to Axios. “They arrested a judge?!” exclaimed Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH). “They can no longer claim to be a party of law and order. This must be a red line for congressional Republicans.”
The details surrounding the other arrest, however, are far more irregular and disturbing than those around Judge Dugan’s case, and lord knows how the Democrats could possibly justify this one.
Both now former Judge Joel Cano and his wife, Nancy Cano, were arrested Thursday for allegedly sheltering a suspected member of the Tren de Aragua gang at their home, according to the New York Post. Joel Cano is charged with tampering with evidence; his wife is charged with conspiracy to tamper, according to Breitbart News. The raid on their Las Cruces, New Mexico, home came after Cano resigned following accusations of harboring 23-year-old Venezuelan migrant Cristhian Ortega-Lopez there. The feds say Ortega-Lopez is a member of the notoriously violent Venezuelan gang. He was picked up by immigration authorities at the couple’s home in February.
In a separate raid at the home of the couple’s daughter, April Cano, ICE recovered four guns allegedly belonging to Ortega-Lopez. He appeared in social media posts posing with the weapons and now faces federal charges for being an undocumented immigrant in possession of a firearm.
Ortega-Lopez allegedly entered the United States illegally during the Biden administration via Eagle Pass, Texas. He had been living in the couple’s guest house after Nancy hired him as a handyman. The New Mexico State Supreme Court removed Joel Cano after reviewing two disciplinary cases, one alleging he let three undocumented immigrants associated with a gang stay in his home. Cano, who served since 2011, resigned before he could be permanently banned.
In his resignation letter from March, Cano doesn’t give a reason for resigning, but court documents show the letter came just days after Homeland Security raided Joel’s home last month looking for evidence that he was harboring the migrants. A search warrant inventory showed agents seized phones, documents, and laptops. The investigation began after a January tipster alleged that three undocumented Venezuelans were staying in Cano’s home, working for the family, and had access to firearms. Migrants Juan Manuel Acevedo-Leon and Efren Jose Montilla-Castillo were also identified. Acevedo-Leon is now in ICE custody. Law enforcement used information from social media posts, where the migrants often posted images with the entire Cano family. One video, shown below, depicts Cano pulling out a rifle that the couple then admire.
The case of the Canos may be an extreme outlier, but regardless, it complicates Democrats’ claims that there exists no “activist judge” conspiracy to deliberately undermine the president’s immigration policy. “It is abundantly clear that many judges have been acting politically to sabotage President Trump’s agenda and disenfranchise the 77 million Americans that voted for him,” said Rep. Derrick Van Orden to Axios. (R-WI). “Judges are not supposed to write the law, and they certainly are not above it.” In a post on X, Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk said that while most judicial corruption is not as obvious as this, “most are just as severe.”
Despite 47% of Democrats believing the courts have a conservative bias (per Pew Research), The Stanford Daily found that Supreme Court voting trends since 2005 are “substantially more liberal” than they are conservative, supporting Republican concerns of judicial bias blocking deportation efforts.
While Democrats call for an investigation into Dugan’s arrest, they’ve been silent about Judge Cano. Given the FBI’s new assessment leaked earlier this week that “some officials” in the Venezuelan government are helping Tren de Aragua members cross U.S. borders to undermine public safety, defending these migrants seems poised to become a radioactive liability for the Democratic Party.
—Adam Lehrer
The Rest
→In a new deal to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, President Trump proposes that the United States formally recognize Crimea as Russian territory, reversing a decade of resistance toward the issue, according to The New York Times. While Ukraine worried that Trump would recognize a Russian-controlled Crimea during his first term, Trump adhered to former President Barack Obama’s policy of refusal to recognize Russian sovereignty over the land. In July 2018, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued an official “Crimea Declaration” pledging that the nonrecognition policy would remain “until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.” Some diplomats call it the “worst” aspect of the new peace proposal because it’s atypical to give legitimacy to changes in borders created by military force. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ruled out the possibility and said it would violate Ukraine’s constitution. Some experts believe that Zelenskyy and European officials might be able to tolerate such a U.S. position, however much they disagree, if they are not pressed to endorse it. “Nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory,” Trump said. Military analysts believe that recapturing Crimea would be near impossible for Ukraine, given that it hasn’t been able to eject Russia from its eastern territories during two years of combat.
→White South Africans seeking asylum in the United States due to issues in their home country with land troubles, crime, and perceived racism are being interviewed by U.S. officials in attempts to secure refugee status. Some of the South African applicants have taken part in a first round of interviews in Pretoria, three of them told Reuters, describing positive encounters with U.S. officials who seemed well disposed toward them and their accounts of persecution. So far, 30 of the applicants have been approved. Two U.S. refugee officers travelled to Pretoria to conduct interviews. “I imagine some (applications) will be denied,” said one official. “But I think there is administrative pressure to approve these.”
→The United States is prepared to offer Saudi Arabia a $100 billion arms package, six sources with direct knowledge of the issue told Reuters. The proposal is being prepared for announcement upon President Trump’s visit to the kingdom next month. Former President Joe Biden unsuccessfully attempted to finalize a defense pact with Riyadh in efforts to normalize ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It couldn’t be established if Trump’s package wouldbe the same or similar to what was offered in Biden’s proposal, which offered Saudi Arabia more access to advanced U.S. weapons in exchange for the Saudis ceasing to purchase Chinese arms.
→Despite garnering the support of morally confused online leftists, the law is coming down hard on the accused UnitedHealthcare assassin Luigi Mangione. Prior to his arraignment Friday, federal prosecutors submitted formal notice to the court that they will seek the death penalty should Mangione be convicted, according to ABC News. The prosecutors cited Mangione’s alleged desire “to provoke broad-based resistance” to the industry of his victim, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione is expected to plead not guilty when he appears Friday for his arraignment on a four-count indictment that charged him, among other things, with murder through the use of a firearm—an offense that, if he is found guilty, would make him eligible for the death sentence.
→The Department of Transportation announced yesterday that it fired and replaced the federal lawyers defending it in a lawsuit with New York over its congestion pricing program, accusing the lawyers of undermining the effort to end the toll, according to The New York Times. The move came after the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which had been handling the case, said it mistakenly filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday night a confidential memo questioning the department’s legal strategy. The department raised concern that the disclosure was a deliberate attempt to sabotage its quest to end New York’s congestion pricing tolls. The Times says that while it’s not unusual for lawyers to advise clients behind closed doors, telegraphing the case’s weaknesses publicly during a tense battle with Gov. Kathy Hochul is, indeed, out of the ordinary.
→Article of the Day
“Don’t bet on Trump to surrender on tariffs,” writes James Rogan in a new op-ed for Washington Examiner. Rogan believes that investors are wrong to believe that Trump is bluffing with his tariffs policy, because the president believes in tariffs on a deep “ideological level”:
Moreover, Trump will only go so far in compromising on his tariff policies. To a degree, Trump will insist on some tariffs because they will provide revenues, which Trump needs to offset tax cut policies that Trump has also promised. Put simply, Trump may have folded his cards in the first game of the tariff negotiations, but there are many more games to play, and Trump holds a lot of aces.
Click the link to read Rogan’s editorial:
→The “radicalized” son of the CIA’s Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Juliane Gallina Gloss, Michael Gloss, was killed on the front lines in Ukraine while fighting for Russia last year, according to the New York Post, reporting an investigation by the Russian outlet Independent Stories. Before he left the United States to fight, Gloss shared images of himself giving the middle finger to the White House and burning an American flag. Border service data showed that he crossed into Russia via Georgia in August 2023, sending photos of his adventures to a group chat of friends in the “Rainbow Family,” a loose-knit, counterculture “hippie” group. That September, Gloss showed up in Russia’s Unified Medical Information and Analytical System of Moscow, where his address was listed as a medical examination room at an Army recruitment point on Yablochkova Street, the same address given to foreign mercenaries who arrive in Moscow to join Russian forces in the Ukrainian conflict. Gloss’ training unit was primarily composed of Nepalese nationals, and in a video that shows him being bussed to his training unit, he is seen wearing a keffiyeh. His mother has not yet responded to press inquiries.
→Former Republican New York Congressman George Santos was sentenced to more than seven years in prison Friday after pleading guilty to wire fraud and identity theft last year, according to The New York Times. During the trial, he admitted to various other infractions, including lying to Congress, fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits, and milking campaign donors for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Santos became something of a cultural icon for both his flamboyant demeanor and his incessant lies about details as minuscule as claiming to have been a star college volleyball player and Wall Street financier with “connections to Sept. 11 and the Holocaust,” whatever that means. After an ethics investigation last year found Mr. Santos had spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics, and OnlyFans, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to push him out.
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“They arrested a judge?!” exclaimed Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH). “They can no longer claim to be a party of law and order. This must be a red line for congressional Republicans.”
This kind of sentiment can only come from a person entirely inexperienced in a courtroom. Within the first decade of my law practice, I was entirely disabused of the belief that judges can be counted on for either objectivity or integrity. Some are fantastically honorable, to be sure. But, in my experience, at least 30% are corrupted. Landsman mustn’t have a law degree. What a joker.
One should not be surprised that radicals wearing robes engage in such illegal conduct