It’s bad enough that Democrats like Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Congresswoman La Monica McIver of New Jersey, and Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark labor so mightily to show their love for violent illegal-alien criminals such as “Maryland dad” and MS-13 member Kilmar Abrego-Garcia and the child rapists and killers housed at the Garden State’s Delaney Hall Detention Center. Pushing unhinged causes is the daily duty of Democrat politicians.
One might expect a bit more restraint among Democrat jurists. But amid Trump Derangement Syndrome, “Orange Man Bad” trumps judicial norms and even the basic assumption that those who interpret the law would not violate it. And yet judges, of all people, are behaving very badly, not just to stymie Trump but to shield some of America’s most dangerous, indeed deadly, illegal aliens. (RELATED: Dictatorship of Obama Judges)
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy has broken no law. However, his legal contortions begin to illustrate how far Democrat jurists will go to chest-feed the worst of the worst among violent illegal-alien criminals. Murphy ordered the federal government to reopen the cases of eight brutal illegal-alien criminals, whom President Donald J. Trump deported to South Sudan. Murphy wants these poor babies to enjoy access to telephones, free lawyers, and brand-new “reasonable fear” interviews in private — just in case something gives them the willies.
Never mind that these thugs invaded America, committed additional violations, were convicted of these crimes, and then received final deportation orders — in some cases, decades ago. In fact, Enrique Arias Hierro was convicted of armed robbery, kidnapping, and second-degree homicide, among other crimes. He was still in America despite scoring a final deportation order on September 13, 1999, courtesy of the Clinton administration! (RELATED: South Africa’s Refugees Expose the Left)
“I was in third grade when this Cuban murderer was ordered deported,” my valiant Fox News colleague Bill Melugin observed via X. “9/11 hadn’t happened yet. NSYNC & Backstreet Boys were dominating the airwaves. I was a Pokémon card dealer. We had just gotten dial-up Internet, I think.”
Judge Murphy does not understand the phrase “reasonable fear.” That is what these fiends’ victims felt as they tormented them — or much worse:
- Jesus Muñoz-Gutierrez of Mexico was convicted of second-degree murder.
- Thongxay Nilakout of Laos was convicted of robbery and first-degree murder.
- Tuan Thanh Phan of Vietnam was convicted of second-degree assault and first-degree murder.
- Nyo Myint of Burma was convicted of aggravated assault and, per the Department of Homeland Security, “first-degree sexual assault involving a victim mentally and physically incapable of resisting.”
Ghastly.
“It is absurd that an activist judge is trying to force the United States to bring back these uniquely barbaric monsters who present a clear and present threat to the safety of the American people,” said Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin.
These men all got heaping helpings of the blessed due process that Leftists demand for them, even though they marched into America and have less-than-zero right to be here. Murphy is giving them more than their fair share of due process. Why the hell is Murphy going the extra mile for these piles of human garbage? (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Hill They’ve Died On)
That said, Murphy’s act is just a warm-up for the true misbehavior of his colleagues on the bench.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan expected Mexican illegal alien Eduardo Flores-Ruiz for an April 18 pre-trial hearing on his three criminal charges. (RELATED: Is Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan Above the Law?)
“This was truly horrific. This guy was in court being prosecuted by a state prosecutor for domestic violence battery,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told my Fox News colleagues John Roberts and Sandra Smith. “He had beat up two people — a guy and a girl. He beat the guy — hit the guy — 30 times, knocked him to the ground, choked him, beat up a woman so badly, they both had to go to the hospital.” Flores-Ruiz’s rap sheet included charges of “strangulation and suffocation,” DHS’s McLaughlin explained.
Judge Dugan learned that a team of FBI and ICE agents was poised to arrest Flores-Ruiz for illegally re-entering the U.S., subsequent to his deportation to Mexico (via Nogales, Arizona), on January 16, 2013. She stormed out of Courtroom 615 and accosted these officers in the public hallway. She told them to visit the chief judge before exercising their arrest warrant. According to a subsequent criminal complaint, “Witnesses uniformly reported that Judge Dugan was visibly upset and had a confrontational, angry demeanor.”
Dugan returned to Courtroom 615. As the criminal complaint against Dugan states, she summoned Flores-Ruiz and his attorney. “Despite having been advised of the administrative warrant for the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Judge DUGAN then escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel out of the courtroom through the ‘jury door,’ which leads to a nonpublic area of the courthouse,” the document elaborates. “Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.”
Flores-Ruiz dashed nearly the full length of the Milwaukee County Courthouse before FBI agents in hot pursuit grabbed him across Tenth Street on that rainy morning.
No one is above the law pic.twitter.com/TSrQ4GNMdA
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) April 26, 2025
Judge Dugan is in boiling water. She now faces federal charges for concealing an individual from arrest and obstructing the law.
“Hannah Dugan should be barred from ever serving as a judge again,” Congressman Tom Tiffany (R – R-Wisc.) said via X. “A judge who puts criminal illegal aliens above victims has no place in our courts.”
Most Americans would greet Dugan’s lawbreaking with shock. However, the correct response should be: “It’s been done.” Dugan’s misdeed was a copycat crime.
Boston Municipal Court Judge Shelley Joseph pulled an almost identical stunt on April 2, 2018. That’s when Dominican illegal alien Jose Medina-Perez entered her courtroom to face narcotics charges. He was in America despite two previous deportations and an order to stay out until at least 2027.
Former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling initially charged Judge Joseph in 2019, during the Trump 45 term. Lelling told WGBH that Judge Joseph needed “to confirm or deny that she intentionally conspired to help the defendant evade federal authorities.” He added: “A federal grand jury concluded that she did, and that would be a serious, politically-motivated abuse of her position.”
Lelling indicted Judge Joseph and then-courtroom deputy Wesley MacGregor for obstruction of justice. Prosecutors said that Judge Joseph and MacGregor plotted to foil federal attempts to arrest Medina-Perez by telling an ICE agent to wait for the illegal alien in the courthouse lobby.
Meanwhile, Judge Joseph let Medina-Perez and his attorney depart her chambers via a back staircase. MacGregor allegedly met Medina-Perez downstairs, opened the rear door, and let him scram while the duped ICE agent waited patiently upstairs, at the front of the building. It took immigration officials a month to nab Medina-Perez.
Before Judge Joseph endured a federal trial for her lawbreaking, Joe Biden’s Department of Justice dropped the case and let her appear before a state panel. She was also freed to mount the bench and conduct trials.
How convenient!
Judge Joseph’s next stop: evaluation before the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct. It will decide whether she committed “willful judicial misconduct.” As luck would have it, Judge Joseph’s MCJC proceeding began yesterday.
While disgraced Judge Jose Luis “Joel” Cano deserves low marks for compliance, he rates five stars for hospitality. The average resort guest could only fantasize about the exquisite service that Christhian Ortega-Lopez, 23, savored under the roof of Cano, a magistrate in Doña Ana County, New Mexico.
The Venezuelan illegal alien breached America’s frontier with Old Mexico on December 15, 2023. In his quieter moments, this suspected Tren de Aragua gangbanger illegally performed handyman duties for Cano’s wife, Nancy. When Ortega-Lopez told her that he had been evicted from his apartment, she welcomed him to the “casita” behind their Las Cruces residence.
The Canos were exceptional hosts. They posed for photos with Ortega-Lopez in their home. They fed him at their dinner table. They included him in last year’s family Christmas celebration.
Suspected Tren de Aragua terrorist Christhian Ortega-Lopez with then-Judge “Joel” Cano and his family in the home that they shared with him (U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico)
But wait. There’s more.
Authorities say that the couple’s daughter, April, supplied him with an array of guns and “allowed him to hold and sometimes shoot various firearms,” according to the U.S. Justice Department. Unfortunately for him, authorities noticed a social media post of “Ortega-Lopez in possession of multiple firearms at a shooting range in Las Cruces,” the DOJ noted. “It is unlawful for any illegal migrant to be in possession of a gun in the U.S.” — so states 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5).
Christhian Ortega-Lopez illegally posed with a gun at a Las Cruces, New Mexico, shooting range (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Pursuing an anonymous tip, federal officials apprehended Ortega-Lopez at the Canos’ home on Feb. 28 as an illegal alien who possessed firearms. This triggered the Canos’ ultimate act of hospitality. As a May 1 DOJ press release explained: “Following Ortega-Lopez’s arrest, authorities allege that Jose Cano destroyed a cellphone belonging to Ortega-Lopez by smashing it with a hammer and discarding the remains, believing it contained incriminating photos and videos. Nancy Cano is accused of conspiring to delete Ortega-Lopez’s Facebook account to eliminate evidence.”
Cano’s hammer must have missed some of Ortega-Lopez’s other phones. A federal-prosecution filing stated that “agents seized three cellphones that are associated with the Defendant on February 28, 2025.” Searching them discovered, among other things, “A conversation with an individual in which the other participant warns Defendant about sending photographs that may jeopardize him in the United States that also includes a request to get a grenade or two 38s. Subsequent to this conversation, there is a set of gruesome photographs of two brutal murder victims that includes mutilated bodies, decapitated heads and dismembered hands.”
None of this alarmed U.S. Magistrate Judge Damian L. Martinez. During a March 14 detention hearing for Ortega-Lopez, Judge Martinez said of former Judge Cano, who resigned March 3: “I’ve met him before several times, and he’s got a B.S. meter … He knows when somebody is B.S.ing him.” Martinez added: “I don’t think he would just let anybody live in his property.”
Evidently, Martinez’s very own, groundbreaking “B.S. Meter Test” was all he needed. As one federal pleading stated: “Judge Martinez found the Defendant was not a flight risk or danger to the community and ordered the Defendant be released.”
Federal prosecutors’ B.S. meters went berserk. They appealed his decision, arguing that, if freed, Ortega-Lopez would ride like the wind. Martinez agreed, and Venezuelan handyman Cristhian Ortega‑Lopez now relaxes in the Doña Ana County Detention Center and awaits next steps.
It would be bad enough if these judges stretched or shredded the law to spare, say, Kasper Juul Eriksen, the Danish Green Card holder who arrived legally in 2009 and married his high school sweetheart, American Savannah Hobart, in 2014. Alas, as they mourned the miscarriage of their first child, they forgot to file a form in 2015.
ICE never mentioned this until the otherwise law-abiding, non-violent, legal immigrant went to Memphis last April 15 for his final, pre-citizenship interview. Instead, the father of four was arrested and dispatched to the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, where he awaits deportation.
Sending Eriksen scrambling down a courthouse’s back staircase, steps ahead of ICE, would be wrong. But it would be far easier to fathom.
What defies explanation are these and other Democrat-Left jurists who are so devoured by Trump hatred that they jeopardize their careers and very freedom to aid and comfort convicted illegal-alien human smugglers, wife beaters, child rapists, and murderers.
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Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.
