Massachusetts' highest court publicly reprimanded District Court Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph on September 10 for her conduct during a 2018 arraignment that ended with an illegal alien walking out a courthouse back door while an ICE officer waited by the front. Four days later, the Department of Homeland Security fired back, with its general counsel telling reporters that "sanctuary judges" are now on notice. The ruling closes an eight-year fight that started the moment Oscar Manuel Peguero slipped out the sallyport exit of Newton District Court, and it lands while the Trump administration is actively hunting for consequences anywhere a state official gets between ICE and the person it came to arrest.

What actually happened in that Newton courtroom

On April 2, 2018, five months into her tenure, Judge Joseph was arraigning Oscar Manuel Peguero, who went by the alias Jose Medina-Perez, on two counts of drug possession and a fugitive-from-justice charge tied to an eight-year-old Pennsylvania warrant. ICE had lodged a detainer against him the day he was arrested, and a plainclothes ICE officer was sitting in the courtroom waiting to take him into custody the moment he was released from state custody. That account comes straight from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's own opinion in In the Matter of Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, SJC No. OE-0157, issued September 10.

Following the practice of the court's first justice, Joseph had the ICE officer wait outside the courtroom. During a lunch recess, defense attorney David Jellinek was hired and noticed what he believed were discrepancies tying Peguero to the Pennsylvania warrant. When the case resumed, Jellinek requested a sidebar and told the judge, on the record, that "ICE is going to pick him up if he walks out the front door" and that he hoped to "avoid ICE." Joseph responded by floating the idea of holding Peguero in state custody overnight, then asked to go off the record. The court clerk cut the courtroom's audio for the next 52 seconds.

How a two-minute sidebar took eight years to resolve

What happened after the recording stopped is disputed, but everyone agrees the outcome: about six minutes after the hearing ended, a court officer opened the courthouse's sallyport door and let Peguero walk out the back, avoiding the ICE officer stationed in the lobby. A federal grand jury indicted Joseph in 2019 on conspiracy to obstruct justice and two related counts, a case covered at the time by the Fox News Boston bureau.

The Biden Justice Department dropped those federal charges in September 2022. What most coverage since has left out is the condition attached to that dismissal: according to the SJC's opinion, prosecutors dropped the case only on the condition that Joseph "formally refer herself" to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct and cooperate with whatever proceeding followed. That self-referral is what actually put her judgeship back on the line, not the initial federal case, which ended with no finding of guilt at all.

The commission's own process then dragged for two more years. Formal charges were not filed until November 2024, a hearing officer took testimony from 17 witnesses over six days in June 2025, and his report went to the full commission that October. The commission itself was not unanimous. According to the SJC opinion's own footnote, one commission member dissented from the recommendation of a public reprimand and argued for a private reprimand made public only "to account for the notoriety of the case," a split in the record that Monday's news coverage from outlets like WBUR did not mention.

Did the court actually clear her of orchestrating the escape?

Yes, on the narrow question of whether Joseph approved Jellinek's plan. The six-justice panel found "the respondent did not, either explicitly or implicitly, approve of such a plan," and credited testimony that the assistant district attorney in the room had no reason to think the judge knew what was coming. Jellinek testified that Joseph gave the escape her "blessing," but the hearing officer rejected that account as "repeatedly at odds with both the factual record and common sense."

That finding is not the same as an exoneration. The court reprimanded Joseph anyway, ruling that her sidebar suggestion to hold Peguero in state custody overnight, offered seconds after Jellinek said he was trying to help his client dodge ICE, "created the appearance of willingness to use a state criminal charge for an illegitimate purpose." Combined with her order to shut off the recording, the court found she violated two separate rules of judicial conduct.

"The respondent's statements during that conversation, including her proposal to detain Medina-Perez overnight in State custody, and her conduct in instructing the clerk to turn off the court room audio recording system, created an appearance of impropriety in violation of her duties." — Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, In the Matter of Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, Sept. 10, 2026

The justices also acknowledged, in their own words, that Joseph's conduct was "less severe" than other Massachusetts judges who have drawn a public reprimand or worse, and cited her inexperience on the bench and the "hardship" of an eight-year ordeal as reasons not to suspend her. She keeps her judgeship. Court records and Massachusetts case listings show she now sits in Boston Municipal Court.

DHS says sanctuary judges are on notice

The reprimand gave the Trump administration exactly the opening it wanted. DHS General Counsel James Percival told Breitbart News that the ruling "reflects what DHS is facing across the country" and that judges who help illegal aliens evade federal custody are inviting felony exposure, a threat with real teeth compared to a letter in a personnel file.

"This judicial misconduct reflects what DHS is facing across the country," Percival said, according to Breitbart News. "Certain judges think it is their duty to undermine, rather than enforce, federal immigration law. Helping illegal aliens escape from immigration officers is a felony. Sanctuary politicians and sanctuary judges alike are on notice." DHS issued a separate formal statement the same day condemning Joseph by name.

Who is Oscar Manuel Peguero, and why was ICE even there

DHS records cited in that statement lay out a pattern that predates the 2018 arraignment by fifteen years. Peguero first tried to enter the country through Boston's Logan Airport in January 2003 by claiming to be a U.S. citizen and was deported that same month. In April 2007 he crossed illegally through New Mexico, was caught by Border Patrol, and was deported a second time that June. He crossed again at an unknown later date, which is how he ended up in front of Judge Joseph in 2018 on a drug charge and an out-of-state fugitive warrant, according to reporting from Tampa Free Press, which cited the DHS statement directly.

The Lunn policy still decides who ICE can grab in a Massachusetts courthouse

Joseph's decision to keep the ICE officer out of her courtroom did not come out of nowhere. It traced back to the Massachusetts Trial Court's "Lunn policy," issued in November 2017 after the SJC's own ruling in Lunn v. Commonwealth, which held that state court officers cannot hold someone in custody based solely on a civil immigration detainer once that person would otherwise be free to go. The policy still lets ICE agents enter a courthouse lockup to make an arrest, but it draws a hard line against state employees doing federal immigration officers' detention work for them.

That is the exact seam Jellinek exploited in 2018, using a court officer's cooperation to move Peguero out a back exit instead of the front lobby where the ICE officer was legally allowed to wait. Nothing in Monday's reprimand changes that policy, and nothing in it holds the court officer or Jellinek to the same account the judge just faced.

What the reprimand does, and does not, change

A public reprimand is one of the more serious sanctions the Massachusetts judiciary hands out, but it carries no suspension, no fine, and no removal. Joseph is still a sitting judge eight years after a man vanished out the back of her courtroom on her watch, and the officials who actually engineered that exit, Jellinek and the unnamed court officer, have faced no comparable public accounting in the SJC's opinion.

What the case does establish, for the first time in writing from the state's highest court, is that a Massachusetts judge can be formally disciplined for merely creating the appearance of steering a defendant away from ICE, even without proof she approved the actual escape. That is a lower bar than criminal obstruction, and DHS is signaling it intends to use every inch of it against the next judge, prosecutor, or local official who tries to run interference on a detainer. The next test of that promise will not wait eight years.