Days before trial, federal prosecutors abruptly dropped all charges against a group of anti-ICE protesters in Chicago after stunning admissions that serious “mistakes” were made, sparking allegations of a wider cover-up and threats of sanctions.
The high-profile case against the “Broadview Six” followed the Trump administration’s surge of federal immigration officers into the nation’s third-largest city, fueling a wave of demonstrations outside an ICE facility in the Chicago suburbs.
A group of protesters including then-congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and several local officials were initially facing felony charges for allegedly banging on an officer’s van.
But unsealed court documents reveal prosecutors kicked out members of a grand jury for disagreeing with them, then tried to present the case again. Another prosecutor communicated with a juror outside court, and transcripts of grand jury testimony submitted to the judge overseeing the case showed heavy redactions.
District Judge April Perry said she was “incredibly shocked” by the documents.
“I treat every attorney who appears before me as an officer of the court,” Perry said, according to transcripts of Thursday’s closed-door hearing.
“I put even more reliance on Department of Justice attorneys. Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” she said. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”
Perry found several “immediately and glaringly” issues with the case after reading the grand jury transcripts.
The judge said an assistant U.S. attorney put “her personal credibility and trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges” then excused grant jurors “who disagreed with the government’s case” and asked them not to participate in a second attempt to land the charges.
It took three grand jury sessions to get an indictment.
The first session resulted in a “no bill,” meaning grand jurors didn’t support the charges. A second session ended abruptly during testimony from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent at the center of the case.
“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” Perry said Thursday. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
“I will tell your honor that as upset as you are, and have been — I, too, had not seen conduct like that, and it upset me, which is why we did dismiss that indictment,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros told the judge Thursday.
“It is my very sincere belief, your honor, that no prosecutor acted intentionally in misleading you,” Boutros said.
Defense attorney Christopher Parente, a former federal prosecutor himself, told reporters that he had “never even heard of something as bad as what took place in this grand jury session” and suggested a “cover-up.”
“I’m sick to my stomach as a former prosecutor,” he said Thursday. “I’m sick to my stomach as a U.S. citizen who has to live in this country with this Department of Justice that is acting this recklessly.”
The case was gradually falling apart over the last several weeks. Prosecutors dropped all charges against two of the defendants in March, and last month, prosecutors dropped a felony conspiracy charge against the remaining defendants.
“The decision to abandon the case’s central and most serious allegation at this late stage speaks volumes,” defense attorneys wrote in a motion earlier this month.
The government’s “remarkable about-face” to abandon the conspiracy charge comes as the Donald Trump’s Justice Department faces “mounting national distrust” in the grand jury process, attorneys wrote.
In Washington, D.C., prosecutors have repeatedly failed to land criminal indictments in cases stemming from the Trump administration’s federal takeover of the nation’s capital, which saw a surge of agents and National Guard troops patrolling the city streets in a show-of-force against crime and illegal immigration.
More than a third of the roughly 300 arrests from recent ICE protests have collapsed in recent months as prosecutors routinely fail to secure felony convictions, while a flood of lawsuits against the Trump administration accuse officers of unconstitutional use of force that has led to serious and life-threatening injuries.
Abughazaleh said she and other protesters were demonstrating against ICE’s “unlawful behavior and how it treats our communities, how it terrorizes everyone.”
“We were saying that enough is enough and that we won’t stand for it,” she told reporters Thursday. “We fought back, and we won.”
