Multnomah County Circuit Court administrators have determined that Pro Tem Judge Monica Herranz didn’t violate any rules of judicial conduct when she allowed an undocumented criminal defendant to leave her courtroom through a back door as immigration agents waited in the hallway.

Trial Court Administrator Barbara Marcille investigated Herranz's actions from Jan. 27 and found that Herranz didn’t knowingly help impaired-driving defendant Diddier Pacheco-Salazar elude capture.

Marcille listened to an audio recording of the hearing, viewed video footage and interviewed 10 people who were in and around the courtroom that day -- including Herranz, her staff and courthouse deputies.

Those accounts were consistent and gave her "a high degree of confidence that I understand the sequence of events that day," Marcille wrote in a memo outlining her findings.

Herranz's attorney, Arden Olson, said Monday that the judge was "unfairly accused in the media based on incomplete information, and has been required to respond to unfair complaints before two regulatory bodies."

"Judge Herranz has violated no law, no ethical principle and no judicial obligation," Arden wrote in an email.

Marcille told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Herranz didn’t know if the defendant was indeed in the country illegally – rather, all she’d been told by Pacheco-Salazar’s defense attorney was that the defendant didn’t have his immigration documentation with him and agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were in the hall asking various defendants of Hispanic ethnicity for their documentation.

Herranz asked if the prosecutor had any objection, and upon hearing none, agreed to let Pacheco-Salazar leave through the back door of her courtroom, which is accessible to other members of the public, Marcille found.

Herranz didn’t know if the agents were there to specifically arrest Pacheco-Salazar, Marcille said. She noted 21 other defendants were scheduled to appear that afternoon in Herranz’s courtroom at the Multnomah County Justice Center.

"No one knew why there were four ICE agents in the hallway all afternoon," Marcille said. "... It caused a lot of fear.”

Information that the immigration agents were waiting expressly to detain Pacheco-Salazar came a few weeks after the hearing when Oregon's U.S. Attorney Billy Williams brought it up at a meeting of Multnomah County Circuit Court judges, Marcille said.

The following week, the incident made headlines amid a heated nationwide debate over President Donald Trump's promised crackdown on illegal immigration. On Jan. 25, two days before Pacheco-Salazar left out the courtroom's back door, Trump signed executive orders calling for building a wall between Mexico and the U.S., hiring 10,000 more immigration agents and creating a publicly available list outlining crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s executive orders instantly spread anxiety throughout immigrant communities in Oregon and across the country, and courthouse officials worried that undocumented immigrants might stop showing up to court to face criminal charges, to testify as witnesses or victims or to seek restraining orders.

Pacheco-Salazar was born in Mexico and had no criminal history before being arrested for driving under the influence of intoxicants in Multnomah County on Dec. 31. The 22-year-old pleaded guilty before Herranz to DUII and reckless driving on Jan. 27, and Herranz ordered him to a diversion program that would require substance-abuse treatment.

Immigration agents picked up Pacheco-Salazar about two weeks later after he showed up to court again. Defense attorney John Schlosser said he believes that his client was deported.

Presiding Judge Nan Waller read Marcille’s investigatory report and told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she agreed with Marcille that Herranz hadn’t violated any conduct rules.

Herranz apparently still faces a complaint filed by Bill Currier, who is the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, with the state's Judicial Fitness and Disability commission in April. Susan Isaacs, the commission's executive director, said she couldn't comment, when asked about the status of the complaint.

Currier and Herranz’s attorney said they haven’t heard from the commission about whether it has made any findings. Currier said he'll continue to press the issue because he believes Herranz's actions were wrong.

Herranz has been licensed as a lawyer in Oregon for 29 years. Under her official title of "referee," she carries out the duties of judge to lighten the heavy load of criminal cases flowing through Multnomah County Circuit Court, the state's busiest court. She was hired in August 2015 and isn't an elected official.

-- Aimee Green