Stranger in a Strange World

You might have heard that the FBI arrested a Milwaukee County circuit court judge yesterday.

And because the arrest was intentionally theatrical and intended to intimidate, all while being unwarranted by what this judge actually did, the community has responded by gathering in large numbers to protest three times in 36 hours. The most stirring gathering was yesterday afternoon in front of Milwaukee’s Federal Building, where the judge was brought in handcuffs, put in a holding cell, and then brought before a federal magistrate. She was then released.

I won’t argue the specifics of the case here. Just know that the judge is very well-respected with a resume as an attorney and community leader as long as your arm. So to have her arrested in this particularly stark and brutal way, when there were other ways to deal with a dispute over her handling of an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom, has basically set the community on fire. She is our own. And we trust her. I told a reporter yesterday, “There is no way Hannah Dugan broke the law. It’s inconceivable.”

The whole operation – from the top down – was meant to scare us. Not to scare the judge. Or judges. Or the judiciary broadly defined. The arrest – by a bunch of guys in plain clothes – was meant to scare us. Scare us into not speaking up or standing with immigrants or, most important of all, insisting on due process for everybody.

So, today, there was a gathering in front of the Milwaukee FBI Office. This is a very big and quite beautiful building overlooking Lake Michigan protected by a cast iron fence. It’s a Saturday so the actual FBI agents wouldn’t be there, I assumed, do they work on weekends? We were able to park across the street in the Catholic Archdiocese parking lot which was a weird juxtaposition of about twelve different things. The local police had closed off the road (S. Lake Drive) and the mood was mellow, festive. When we left a man told us 1,267 people had come to the protest. I didn’t ask how he knew.

Before I left the house, my husband gave me a gator that he’d found in the bottom of our winter hat box. He told me to wear the gator and my sunglasses, along with my baseball cap, to avoid getting identified by the FBI. All afternoon, before heading out, I pondered getting arrested. After all, a circuit court judge was just arrested and handcuffed, so what would keep the FBI from arresting the lot of us. For what? I thought. They’d arrest a 77-year-old lady for holding a sign? Maybe. Everything we thought would never happen seems to be happening.

I started to worry about being handcuffed. My nose always runs when I’m cold or hot or stressed, pretty much all the time, so I obsessed about how I would wipe my nose if my hands were cuffed behind my back. Then, I wondered, could I ask a law enforcement person to wipe my nose, you know, like I was a toddler oblivious to snot running down my face? Or do they not do that?

When we got back in the car to leave, I read a text from my husband, “Are you in the pokey?”

“Nope.” I answered. “Good,” he said.

I am a stranger in a strange world.