I find it extremely doubtful that she told the agents he'd be leaving through a particular door or that she had any legal obligation to make sure the man exited in a particular way.
> (1)(A) Any person who
[…]
> (iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation;
[…]
> shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2023-title8/html/...
Does that cover "Hey, this door is closer to where we are going"? It's going to rest on convincing a jury that the only possible reason the suspect would go out that door would be the judge explicitly trying to help them evade arrest.
IMO that should be impossible to prove but we have never taken "Beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously.
"knowing or in reckless disregard"
Funny, nobody ever arrests any of the employers choosing not to verify the documents of their employees.
If the details of what their witness (court deputy) says is true then it's pretty obvious what happened here.
Whether the government should give State judges that leeway is another issue.
Another possibility is for downvotes to be public, and then allow people to "filter out" downvoters who seem politically motivated (a personal list would be fine, I assume it's like 5 people). HN can't really survive in the year 2025 without some radical anti-politics technology.
I agree any system that ranks posts purely on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes isn't well equipped to handle discussions of controversial topics. Unless there's a strong culture of respecting dissenting opinions it inevitably just turns into an echo chamber for one side or the other. There needs to be some way to filter out votes motivated by ideology rather than post quality.
X's Community Notes has the right idea I think, in that its algorithm takes into account the ideological biases of the voters and ranks notes based on the overall consensus across multiple ideological perspectives rather than just on whichever ideological perspective has the greatest total number of votes. That's a lot harder to implement though.
Perhaps you’re a lawyer with greater insight into this issue than I have. The actions described in the article satisfy the plain reading of the terms “conceal, harbor, or shield from detection.”
The intuitive reading seems to be further corroborated by the case law:
> The word "harbor" […] means to lodge or to aid or to care for one who is secreting himself from the processes of the law. The word "conceal" […] means to hide or to secrete or to keep out of sight or to aid in preventing the discovery of one who is secreting himself from the processes of the law.
> *The statute proscribes acts calculated to obstruct the efforts of the authorities to effect arrest of the fugitive,* but it does not impose a duty on one who may be aware of the whereabouts of the fugitive, although having played no part in his flight, to reveal this information on pain of criminal prosecution.
Emphasis mine.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Using a special backdoor to avoid agents is "concealing", she allegedly did that to prevent him from being seen by the agents.
Original title: "Former New Mexico judge and wife arrested by ICE". It's as though he wasn't an active judge while harboring an alleged Tren De Aragua gang member.
Protip: believe absolutely nothing you read in mainstream news sources on any even remotely political topic. Read between the lines, sort of like people used to read Pravda in the Soviet Union.
To be fair, you're not far off at this point.
None of that is to say that what she did was morally wrong—often the law and morality are at odds.
(It's not a crime to aid illegals if the authorities don't have a valid warrant.)
So the judge is no more "obstructing justice" than if I refuse to open the door to let ICE agents in to arrest someone with an administrative warrant, and then that person leaves out the back door.
ICE should have obtained a judicial warrant, but they didn't. That's their fault.