The Department of Homeland Security says sanctuary judges across the country are now "on notice" after Massachusetts's highest court formally reprimanded a judge who allegedly helped an illegal immigrant slip out a courthouse back door to evade federal agents.
DHS General Counsel James Percival issued the warning after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down a formal public reprimand against Judge Shelley Joseph on September 10. The disciplinary action capped a years-long legal saga that began in April 2018, when prosecutors say Joseph allowed a twice-deported illegal immigrant to escape ICE custody, and ordered a courtroom clerk to shut off the audio recording while it happened.
Percival told Breitbart News that the reprimand exposed a pattern far beyond one Massachusetts courtroom.
"This judicial misconduct reflects what DHS is facing across the country. Certain judges think it is their duty to undermine, rather than enforce, federal immigration law."
He did not stop there. Percival called the underlying conduct a crime, not merely an ethics violation.
"Helping illegal aliens escape from immigration officers is a felony. Sanctuary politicians and sanctuary judges alike are on notice."
The man at the center of the case is Oscar Manuel Peguero, who also used the alias Jose Medina-Perez. His immigration history stretches back more than two decades and illustrates the revolving door that federal enforcement agencies have long struggled to seal.
In January 2003, Peguero flew into Boston and claimed to be an American citizen. He was arrested and deported. Four years later, in April 2007, he illegally crossed the southern border through New Mexico. Border Patrol agents caught him, and he was deported again by June 2007. At some point after that second removal, Peguero crossed the border a third time.
By April 2018, Peguero was living in Massachusetts when police arrested him on drug possession charges. He also had an outstanding warrant as a fugitive from justice in Pennsylvania. ICE lodged a detainer against him the same day, and federal agents positioned themselves outside the courtroom where he was set to appear before Judge Joseph.
The detainer was not honored. Prosecutors later alleged that Joseph allowed Peguero to exit through a back door, letting him walk past the waiting ICE agents without being taken into custody. The courtroom's audio recording system, which would have captured what happened during the proceedings, had been shut off, on Joseph's instruction, the New York Post reported.
The following year, Joseph was charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, aiding and abetting obstruction of justice, and aiding and abetting obstruction of a federal proceeding. The charges were serious. A federal judge who actively helps a defendant evade immigration enforcement faces the same criminal exposure as any civilian who obstructs a federal officer.
But by 2022, the Biden administration dropped all charges against Joseph. The decision drew no public explanation in the available record, and it left the case in a kind of legal limbo, serious enough to charge, apparently not serious enough to prosecute under the prior administration's priorities.
That pattern, judges making controversial rulings that undercut immigration enforcement while facing little or no consequence, is exactly what Percival's statement targeted. The formal reprimand from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, while far short of criminal punishment, at least put the conduct on the official record.
The court found that Joseph "created an appearance of impropriety in violation of her duties" by instructing her clerk to turn off the courtroom audio recording system. The Commission on Judicial Conduct concluded that Joseph engaged in willful judicial misconduct that brought the judicial office into disrepute.
Joseph's attorney, Elizabeth Mulvey, framed the outcome differently. "It had been an incredibly long and difficult eight years for Judge Joseph," Mulvey said, casting her client as someone who had already suffered enough through the prolonged proceedings.
The Joseph case does not exist in isolation. In Wisconsin, former Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was convicted of felony obstruction for helping an illegal immigrant named Eduardo Flores-Ruiz evade ICE agents, conduct strikingly similar to what Joseph allegedly did. Federal prosecutors sought 15 to 21 months in prison for Dugan. She received a $5,000 fine and no jail time, Fox News reported.
Dugan's attorney said they look forward to appealing the conviction. But the contrast between the two outcomes is hard to miss. Dugan was convicted of a felony and walked away with a fine that amounts to pocket change for a sitting judge. Joseph was charged with federal crimes, saw those charges evaporate under a sympathetic administration, and ultimately received a written reprimand, a mark on her professional record, but not a day in jail, not a dollar in fines, and not a removal from the bench.
For the illegal immigrants these judges allegedly helped, the stakes were different. Peguero had already been deported twice, had re-entered the country illegally three times, carried an outstanding warrant from another state, and was facing drug charges. He was not a sympathetic asylum seeker caught in bureaucratic limbo. He was a repeat offender who had made a career of ignoring American law, and a judge allegedly helped him keep doing it.
The broader pattern Percival described, judges who view federal immigration law as an obstacle rather than an obligation, has surfaced repeatedly in recent years. Even some Democrats have warned that open defiance of federal authority on immigration risks a constitutional crisis. When elected and appointed officials decide which federal laws they will honor and which they will sabotage, the rule of law stops meaning much at all.
And the judiciary is not the only branch where this tension plays out. Federal judges have repeatedly blocked or delayed immigration enforcement actions, only to reverse course when higher courts intervened, a cycle that burns time, money, and public trust while illegal immigrants remain in the country.
A formal reprimand is the mildest form of judicial discipline. It does not remove Joseph from the bench. It does not bar her from hearing future cases. It does not carry any financial penalty. What it does is create an official finding of misconduct, a paper trail that DHS can now point to as evidence that the problem is real, documented, and sanctioned by a state's own highest court.
Several questions remain unanswered. Whether Peguero was ever located or arrested by ICE after his 2018 escape is not addressed in the available record. Joseph's own public response to the reprimand, if any, has not surfaced. And the specific terms of the reprimand, whether it carries any probationary conditions or future consequences for repeated misconduct, remain unclear.
What is clear is that DHS under the current administration has chosen to treat the Joseph case not as an isolated incident but as a warning shot. Percival's language was deliberate: sanctuary judges, like other members of the judiciary who have used their authority to obstruct federal enforcement, are being told that the federal government is watching and that the legal consequences for obstruction have not changed, even if the political will to enforce them has wavered in the past.
A judge who shuts off the recording, opens the back door, and lets a twice-deported illegal immigrant walk past federal agents did not create an "appearance" of impropriety. She created the real thing. The only question is whether a written reprimand is enough to stop the next judge from doing the same.