We Will Find You

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
— Judge Learned Hand

The courthouse was never meant for spectacle.
Its marble floors, the heavy breath of its doors—these were built for slower things: for waiting, for weighing, for the long, imperfect work of justice.
But yesterday, on an unseasonably cold morning in Milwaukee, the doors swung open to something else entirely: a judge, handcuffed, her black robe brushing the ground as she was led away by federal agents.

There were no grand speeches.
No sudden break in the sky.
Only the muted echo of footsteps across stone, and a hush so sharp it seemed almost to pulse.
Democracy, it turns out, does not always fall all at once.
Sometimes it hesitates—at a doorway, at a decision, in the quiet spaces where fear first finds its way.

The woman walking through that door was Judge Hannah Dugan.
For decades, she had stood in quieter rooms, defending the displaced, the poor, the overlooked.
Housing disputes. Public benefits appeals. Challenges to laws that made survival itself feel criminal.
To those who knew her, Dugan was no firebrand. She was a steward: of process, of fairness, of the fragile, unfinished promise of justice.

And yet, when federal agents appeared in her courtroom to arrest a man on misdemeanor charges, it was not only the defendant who found himself pursued.
It was Dugan who, according to authorities, directed him through a side door—a choice prosecutors would frame as obstruction, and her defenders would call a stand against a system growing colder by the hour.
By the end of the week, the judge who once stitched the edges of law and compassion together would be recast in the coarse language of fugitives and betrayal.

Elsewhere, a former magistrate’s fall offered a darker, less complicated kind of sorrow.
Joel Cano, once a judge in New Mexico, faced allegations too heavy to explain away: harboring a suspected gang member, destroying evidence, giving guns to those already tangled in violence.
There was no softening the weight of those accusations, no way to wrap them in better light.

It would have been necessary to hold these stories apart.
To remember that discernment is the lifeblood of justice.
That not all robes are draped over the same betrayals.
That not all doors are opened for the same reasons.

But fear does not ask for precision.
And power, when threatened, does not pause to separate guilt from defiance.

Attorney General Pam Bondi's message on national television was clear: "We will find you."
Not just the lawless, but any judge who paused—who offered less than blind obedience.

What was once the language of betrayal had found a new target—the quiet stewards of justice.

It was not only lawbreakers who became targets.
It was the slow, fragile breathing room between accusation and conviction that was marked for erasure.

Watching it happen—the handcuffs, the headlines, the threat wrapped in applause—I felt something heavier than anger settle.
The kind of dread that does not roar but folds low into the body.
The kind that knows some fractures are too small to hear until it is too late to mend them.

I have felt that silence before.
Not in marble halls, but in rooms where trust was supposed to hold:
A teacher whose silence snapped harder than any shout.
A boss who rewrote the rules mid-course.
A neighbor whose gaze hardened the borders of belonging.
None of it loud. None of it immediate.
Only small, steady cracks spidering across the floor beneath us—and the soft, unvoiced question:
If the ground could betray me once, why not again?

It is tempting to believe that democracies fall through spectacular betrayals.
But more often, they unravel quietly:
In doorways.
In silences.
In the slow forgetting of what, and who, we once promised to protect—not just outside of us, but within.

I think of that jury door in Milwaukee—the one Judge Dugan opened.
A door meant for protection, for passage, for the unseen scaffolding of justice.
A door that, in one moment, became something far heavier.
A threshold between two futures: one where law could still hold, and one where it bowed to fear.

I wonder how many doors like it still stand.
How many have already been locked.
How many, even inside us, have started to close without a sound.

The courthouse doors are still open, for now.
But every echoing step asks the same, unanswerable thing:

When the last door closes, will we even know it?