The government’s attempt to prosecute resistance to the president’s mass deportations mission has been destructive, absurd, often contradicted by the evidence offered, and conspicuously unbound by law. The White House has also lost an uncharacteristic number of these cases, including, most recently, one that originated when federal prosecutors sought to charge a group of demonstrators for protesting the Broadview immigration detention center outside Chicago. Last week, the judge in the case learned that the government attorneys had corrupted the grand jury process, including by redacting official transcripts, in order to secure an indictment against the Broadview Six, as the group of demonstrators became known. With the lawyers’ “errors,” as they called them, now exposed, the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, dismissed all charges.
“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” said the judge, April Perry. She added that sanctions against the federal prosecutors involved may follow—a rare bit of accountability, maybe, in the Trump age, and in an especially destructive case that should never have got as far as it did.
Demonstrations at the Broadview immigration jail preceded Operation Midway Blitz, when federal agents arrested thousands of people in the metro area—more than 2,000 in October 2025 alone. As of April 2026, they had deported more than 2,400 people arrested. As more ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents occupied the city throughout September and October, the protests at Broadview became larger and drew more attention and more repression. Broadview was soon used by the Department of Homeland Security as a backdrop for propaganda—sometimes featuring the homeland security director at the time, Kristi Noem—meant to dramatize the danger protesters allegedly posed. But the “danger” followed a now-familiar pattern. People peacefully standing in the way of an ICE vehicle were said to be threatening the safety of the agents inside. Indeed the Broadview Six were apparently so threatening that they were not stopped and arrested on the spot. Instead, it took the government nearly a month to convene a grand jury willing to bring an indictment, which was filed under seal on October 23, leveling federal conspiracy charges against a small group of people who happened to be near one another at the same September 26 demonstration.
It’s important to remember that back when the Department of Justice first sought these indictments, the city and much of its surrounding towns were living under siege from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nearly every morning for months, neighborhoods across the city would brace for the arrival of caravans of unmarked SUVs and masked federal agents dressed for combat. As the agents flooded residential streets, parking lots, and school drop-off and pickup, they were followed by community members whistling and witnessing and recording. Some of these people later returned to help the neighborhoods recover long after ICE had left. Some stood vigil outside detention centers to welcome those who were released. What was remarkable to many watching across the country was demonstrators’ almost ordinary-seeming willingness to stand in the way of ICE abductions. It was that boldness, that courage to interfere with and confront mass deportations—and the way it spread far beyond Chicago—that the Trump administration wanted to stop.
This is why the issue in this case is not what exactly these six people did or did not do. Arguably, it never was: The Broadview prosecutions were about how far the Trump administration and its allies in the Department of Justice were willing to go to punish people for showing up for their immigrant neighbors.
From the start, the case and the government’s story were sketchy, designed more to have a chilling effect on the ongoing protests, perhaps, than to actually succeed in court. Indeed, now we know a bit more about how desperately constructed the case was. The first group of jurors to hear the government’s case refused to indict the Broadview Six, as we learned from accounts of the grand jury proceedings that were revealed in Judge April Perry’s courtroom last week. The secretive grand jury process, in which only prosecutors are present to make their case unchallenged and transcripts are kept sealed, had allowed federal prosecutors in the Broadview Six case to conceal the fact that after the jury did not give them the indictment they wanted, they dismissed some jurors and replaced them with others who would.
The resulting indictment charged Kat Abughazaleh, Andre Martin, Michael Rabbitt, Catherine Sharp, Brian Straw, and Joselyn Walsh with conspiracy to impede a federal officer, to which all six pleaded not guilty in November. One of the defendants, Abughazaleh, was a candidate for Congress at the time; Sharp was running for a Cook County board seat and was chief of staff to a Chicago alderman; others were also involved in local progressive politics. In March, prosecutors dropped all charges against two of the defendants. The next day, the remaining defendants filed a motion seeking documents related to prosecutors’ possible communications with the Trump administration about the case, a motion prosecutors strongly objected to, claiming that even raising the possibility of such coordination was to suggest that the prosecutors were engaged in misconduct. In late April, prosecutors suddenly dropped the conspiracy charges from the grand jury’s indictment, instead pursuing separate misdemeanor offenses against the remaining four defendants. Only last Thursday in court did U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros admit that the decision to drop the conspiracy charges came once he learned of his attorneys’ misconduct with the grand jury. He had nevertheless continued toward trial, until Judge Perry questioned them about the grand jury transcripts.
U.S. Attorney Boutros, for whom the Broadview Six prosecutors worked, might take issue with the idea that there was a political dimension to their approach to the case. Boutros was chosen to lead the Northern District of Illinois office on an interim basis by then–Attorney General Pam Bondi about a year ago, at a time when thousands had quit the Justice Department. That number would soon include some lawyers from his own office, an “unprecedented exodus of experience, talent and leadership,” one former federal prosecutor said, that “diminishes the office.” Boutros oversaw the office at the height of Operation Midway Blitz. In the course of doing so he praised Bondi, though he has forcefully rejected the understandable concerns that, as numerous federal prosecutors have in the midst of the anti-immigrant mission, he would be taking direction from Trump. “You should write this down,” Boutros told the Chicago Sun-Times this April: In “not a single case,” he said, was “politics” involved in their decision-making. “And anyone who says otherwise is misstating reality. And anyone who says otherwise is an armchair expert who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Period.”
Now Boutros says he is reviewing other cases brought by his office for the kinds of misconduct seen in the Broadview Six case. Still, he believes there was “no deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecutors,” as he told Judge Perry last week, adding, “I will tell Your Honor that as upset as you are and have been, I was upset as well.” That may be. But as one of the defense attorneys said in response, “until yesterday [Boutros] knew what was in those grand jury transcripts and he was still instructing his prosecutors to go to trial on this.” And in court days later, the same defense attorney alleged that Boutros himself may have had improper contact with the grand jury.
Whether or not the prosecutors willfully violated the defendants’ right to a fair trial, they certainly resented the suggestion that they could be doing so at the direction of the administration. In a brief filed when the case was still headed to trial, U.S. Attorney William Hogan fumed that the notion “that officials in Washington” would “blithely expect career prosecutors in Chicago to violate multiple ethical and legal standards to go along with illegitimate orders while jeopardizing their professional reputations” was “the product of fevered paranoia and delusional speculation, not to mention grossly disingenuous and thoroughly irresponsible, and that “the unavoidable conclusions to be drawn” from such accusations, he added, are that the government lawyers on the case “have not only acted in bad faith but have committed prosecutorial misconduct.” At the time, Judge Perry agreed with Hogan that she didn’t see any evidence of this being a politically motivated case. But just a few weeks later, Hogan’s own boss would offer evidence that those suspicions of “prosecutorial misconduct” indeed had merit.
When Hogan showed up in Judge Perry’s courtroom last week to ask for all charges to be dropped, he admitted that he had engaged in redacting the grand jury transcripts. Boutros was there too, and, in an unusual appearance, he could not stop himself from saying—on the record—that conduct such as the defendants’ was “unacceptable in a civilized society.” He also said that the prosecution “stand by the charges that we were prepared to bring.” For her part, Judge Perry replied that he was “significantly undercutting [his] mea culpa here,” by continuing “to vilify these particular defendants.”
The defendants’ own cases may be over, but they are not letting the prosecutors go so easily. In addition to seeking sanctions against the prosecutors involved, defense attorneys have said that their clients may file for compensation from Trump’s new “weaponization” fund. Any relief they get, at this stage, does not erase the impact of those fearsome federal conspiracy indictments. Nor can sanctions undo the apparent willingness of federal prosecutors to throw themselves into such apparent misconduct. It would be tempting to imagine they were motivated precisely by the reasons they said they were not: following political orders, scoring wins for the administration’s side. But it’s just as possible that prosecutors willing to engage in such misconduct are less the product of Trump than among the engines that enabled Trump to gain and return to power.
