‘Broadview 6’ defense accuses feds of keeping grand jury transcripts
secret, reneging on dropping conspiracy charge
[May 06, 2026]
By Hannah Meisel
CHICAGO — Attorneys for the remaining “Broadview Six” immigration
protesters indicted in October say federal prosecutors are abusing their
power in order to keep secret what they told the grand jury that
resulted in charges, including a rare conspiracy count.
The accusations, contained in a pair of motions filed Monday, follow the
government lawyers’ surprise move last week when they told the judge
overseeing the case that they intended to drop the main conspiracy
charge against the four remaining defendants.
While defense attorneys characterized it as a “win” for their clients,
they also suggested the feds’ unexpected move was a strategic way to
avoid having to hand over unredacted transcripts of the grand jury’s
three meetings prior to delivering an indictment.
U.S. District Judge April Perry had called an April 29 hearing to
examine the grand jury transcripts, but just as she was asking
prosecutors if they objected to them being provided to the defendants,
Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan told the judge she’d “find that is
moot” as prosecutors were moving to dismiss the conspiracy count. The
conspiracy charge was the only felony in the indictment, and grand
juries do not generally consider misdemeanor charges.
But defense attorneys now say prosecutors have gone back on their word
and are trying to “have its cake and eat it, too” by holding off on
officially moving to drop the conspiracy charge until after the trial on
the remaining misdemeanor charges, scheduled for May 26.
“The Section 372 felony conspiracy charge continues to hang over the
defendants like the proverbial Sword of Damocles,” the motion said,
going on to speculate that prosecutors could later reverse course and
“prosecute them for this conspiracy charge it now says it wants to leave
pending (at least for the foreseeable future).”
One motion filed Monday asked Perry to dismiss the conspiracy count
herself, while the other renewed defendants’ demand to see the grand
jury transcripts. The judge on Tuesday scheduled an early morning
hearing in the case Thursday.
Defense attorneys argued that leaving the conspiracy charge up in the
air “dramatically impacts the trial,” including how trial strategy is
shaped.
Moreover, the lawyers argued there could only be “three plausible
explanations” for why the government would want to keep the grand jury
transcripts secret from both the judge and the defendants: That
prosecutors “mis-instructed” the grand jury on the law, “failed to
instruct the grand jury on the law at all,” or said something to the
grand jury that was “otherwise improper or prejudicial.”
The motion referenced the Department of Justice’s recent indictments of
former FBI Director James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center,
saying the DOJ’s choice to “abandon” the conspiracy charge “rather than
submit to scrutiny its conduct before the grand jury comes at a time of
mounting national distrust in the Department of Justice’s use of the
grand jury process.”
“These actions only underscore the growing concern that the grand jury
is being wielded not as an instrument of justice, but as a tool of
unchecked prosecutorial power meant to persecute any perceived enemies
of the current White House,” the motion said.
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Former 9th District congressional candidate Katherine “Kat”
Abughazaleh addresses reporters following her Nov. 12, 2025,
arraignment hearing in Chicago. (Capitol News Illinois photo by
Hannah Meisel)
Conspiracy charge
The case stems from a Sept. 26, 2025, demonstration outside a U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Chicago suburb of
Broadview, which at the time was the epicenter of protests against the
Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign dubbed “Operation
Midway Blitz.”
Social media video of the protest posted by
influencer-turned-congressional candidate Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh
captured the moment she and dozens of others surrounded an ICE vehicle
that drove through the demonstrating crowd, banging on its windows.
A month later, Abughazaleh and five others were charged with an
overarching count of felony conspiracy, which alleged they conspired to
“interrupt, hinder, and impede” a federal immigration agent from the
“discharge of his official duties.” They were also each individually
charged with misdemeanor simple assault of a federal officer, which does
not require physical contact.
The vehicle’s windshield wipers were damaged and someone scratched “PIG”
into its side, though the government has acknowledged it isn’t alleging
any of the defendants perpetrated those specific acts of vandalism.
The feds dropped charges against two defendants in March. But the group
still includes Abughazaleh, her deputy campaign manager, Andre Martin,
Chicago 45th Ward Democratic Committeeman Michael Rabbitt, and Oak Park
Trustee Brian Straw.
Though five of the six defendants were politically active, they maintain
they did not know each other — with the exception of Abughazaleh and her
campaign manager — and were targeted because of their public profiles,
though Perry has shut down attempts to dismiss the case based on
selective prosecution grounds.
The attorneys said their research hasn’t turned up a single other time
in the last 150 years that U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern
District of Illinois charged a defendant of conspiring to impede or
injure a federal agent.
In a footnote, defense lawyers wrote that they’ve been requesting to see
grand jury transcripts for months “based on the government’s novel
charging theory in this case and the far-fetched nature of a
‘spontaneous conspiracy’ they somehow convinced a grand jury to go along
with.”
But after prosecutors recently asked the court for more time to obtain
them, the attorneys speculated in that same footnote that “the
government never even checked to see how they actually instructed the
grand jury on the law in a case they were using a statute for the first
time in this District.”
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