Federal prosecutors have decided to drop all remaining criminal charges against four people indicted in October after protesting outside a suburban Chicago immigration detention center in the latest such case to unravel for the Trump administration.
Andrew Boutros, a US attorney, made the announcement on Thursday after a meeting about redactions made by prosecutors to a set of grand jury transcripts. Boutros told US district judge April Perry he had learned of what happened three weeks earlier.
He said that while prosecutors were abandoning their efforts, the conduct of the protesters was “unacceptable in a civilized society”.
The four protesters – Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin and Brian Straw – were charged in October with conspiring to impede an officer, a felony, at the immigration detention center in Broadview, Illinois. They were among a half-dozen charged demonstrators who came to be called the Broadview Six.
Prosecutors alleged the group surrounded an immigration agent’s van with other protesters during Operation Midway Blitz, one front of the immigration crackdown that Donald Trump’s administration mounted in a number of US cities after the start of his second presidency.
The demonstrators were accused of banging and pushing on the vehicle, scratching the word “pig” on the car, and breaking a rear windshield wiper during a protest in September. They were met with teargas, pepper balls and rubber pellets during the demonstrations.
The Broadway Six prosecutions began to fall apart in April when questions about grand jury transcripts surfaced and prosecutors declined to make further allegations against the demonstrators. Prosecutors had dropped charges against two of the defendants before Thursday.
But the four remaining defendants faced misdemeanor charges of impeding a federal officer, though prosecutors had dismissed conspiracy charges against them.
The case was due to be heard after the Memorial Day holiday but has now been dismissed with prejudice – meaning that charges cannot be refiled.
As a centerpiece of legal battles over the right to protest and claims that demonstrators illegally infringed on the operation of law enforcement, the collapse of the case is a setback for the government.
Attorneys for the protesters said they would seek copies of the unredacted grand jury transcripts.
“The revelations of the grand jury misconduct that led to the dismissal of the charges is sadly not surprising,” said Abughazaleh’s defense attorney, Josh Herman. “This misguided case should have never been brought against Kat Abughazaleh or any of her co-defendants for exercising their protected first amendment rights” to free speech under the US constitution.
Attorneys for Martin said in a statement that their client and his co-defendants had been “living under the threat of going to prison simply for exercising their first amendment rights as decent, honorable citizens and seeking to protect their fellow human beings”.
After the closed-door hearing, Judge Perry said she was considering holding a hearing on possible sanctions for the US attorney’s office over their actions. Boutros did not dispute the allegations, saying the conduct was upsetting and the very reason the case was being dismissed.
“No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law,” Boutros said.
Thursday’s developments came after Illinois state police said they were investigating the death of Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, who was shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park.
Meanwhile, on 20 November, the Chicago US attorney’s office dropped charges against Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by a border patrol agent after she allegedly tried to ram agents with her car.
Martinez – a US citizen and Montessori schoolteacher in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park – had been indicted on 5 October on charges of impeding a federal officer with a deadly weapon.
Furthermore, in January, a Chicago jury acquitted Juan Espinoza Martinez, whom the Trump administration had charged with plotting a hit on a high-profile border patrol official.
