As an agile team we would like to see "certain" issue on top of a rapid board (using story swimlanes) to give them maximum visibility

Use case:
We use a scrum board with story (soon epic) swimlanes. All issues are required by our process to have subtasks so the actual planning order is respected despite the swimlanes. However, escalated tickets don't necessarily follow this process and must have maximum visiblity (production system down, integration test failure...). So we would like to have such issue on top of the board instead of the bottom no matter whether they have subtasks or not. Optimally, we would have special swimlanes for such issues.

Solution idea:
Allow at least one JQL query that overrides the swimlane setting that will still be used for all non-matching issues. Unclear to me how to best display if such issues have subtasks themselves again.