When Donald Trump was criminally indicted in Manhattan in 2023, he was given a courtesy that’s not the norm for the many New Yorkers accused of crimes on any given day: He was given a heads-up about the charges against him and told to appear in court for his arraignment, without the need to arrest him and bring him before the judge. As a former president, the first in history to be indicted, he was neither a flight risk nor a danger to public safety, the thinking went. There was no need for the public spectacle, or ridicule, of him facing the criminal system like just about everyone else.

The Trump administration gave no such courtesy to Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan on Friday. She was arrested at the courthouse where she works, over FBI allegations, not yet approved by a federal grand jury, that she obstructed the functions of ICE by concealing a person the agency wanted to arrest while that person, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was in Dugan’s courtroom facing her in an unrelated domestic violence matter. According to the FBI, the judge allowed the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, to exit her courtroom through a side door near the jury box to a nonpublic area that then led to a public area of the courthouse.

Minutes after the judge’s arrest, Kash Patel, a former public defender and now the FBI director, was so ebullient about the charges that he posted about it on X, as one does in highly sensitive cases, and then deleted it before posting it again shortly after noon. Did he get a talking to from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is above........

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