U.S. attorney acknowledges speech to ‘Broadview 6’ grand jury as calls
for his resignation mount
[June 03, 2026]
By Hannah Meisel
CHICAGO — Nearly two weeks after missteps by federal prosecutors
compelled U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to personally appear in court to
drop charges against the remaining “Broadview Six” protesters, Boutros
on Tuesday acknowledged having spoken to the October grand jury that
would go on to indict the group later that day.
The U.S. attorney’s office framed the acknowledgement, contextualized in
a five-page “special report,” as a direct rebuttal to a defense
attorney’s assertion last week that Boutros himself had “personal
contact” with the grand jury.
Instead, the report explained that Boutros decided to address three
ongoing grand juries “given prior grand jury disturbances and potential
tension” on Oct. 16, 2025, when the lead prosecutor excused grand jurors
who disagreed with the government’s case against the protesters.
It was prosecutors’ second time presenting the evidence; the previous
week, a separate grand jury had refused to indict the protesters.
Federal grand juries in Chicago declined to indict at least four other
immigration protesters this past fall, according to ongoing tracking and
previous reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times.
On the morning of what would be the feds’ third try presenting evidence
about the Broadview Six, on Oct. 23, 2025, the U.S. attorney appeared in
front of the grand jury “to remind the grand jurors of their obligations
under the law and the role they play in our constitutional form of
government,” according to the special report. Boutros also gave a
similar four-minute speech to two other ongoing grand juries that week,
around the same time of the Trump administration’s Chicago-focused
“Operation Midway Blitz” mass deportation campaign.
“If there’s anyone here who is struggling with a certain type of cases,
such as the immigration cases or other cases where they do not believe
that they can set aside their personal — their personal emotions, that
they cannot listen and deliberate honestly and objectively, I would ask
that you raise your hand and identify yourself, because we have a
different procedure for that,” Boutros said.
Apparently, no one raised their hand.
But Chris Parente, a lawyer for one of the former defendants, Oak Park
village trustee Brian Straw, insisted Boutros’ speech did constitute
“personal contact” with the grand jury. In a statement, the attorney
pointed to the U.S. attorney’s remark that there would be a “different
procedure” for those with “personal feelings on immigration cases” just
one week after the prosecutor “dismissed grand jurors who voiced
dissent” seeing the same evidence in the Broadview Six case.
“Of all days for the U.S. Attorney to make a rare appearance before the
grand jury, that he would be present on the day he likely knew this case
would be re-presented speaks for itself,” Parente said.
Two hours after Boutros’ office published his report, the former
defendants filed the first of what’s expected to be multiple motions for
sanctions against the feds, this time demanding the U.S. Department of
Justice pay attorneys’ fees, claiming “wide-ranging misconduct” by
prosectors in their case.
Also on Tuesday, Illinois’ U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth
jointly called on Boutros to resign, saying his office “has been riddled
with chaos, deep internal dysfunction, and alleged misconduct.” The
resignation request follows Durbin’s announcement last month that the
former lead prosecutor in the Broadview Six case had been fired from her
new job representing the DOJ as counsel for the Senate Judiciary
Committee.
A case unravels
After being presented with evidence about the six protesters’ actions on
Sept. 26, 2025, outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
processing center in Chicago’s near-west suburb of Broadview, the grand
jury indicted them on a rare felony conspiracy charge. The group, along
with dozens of others, surrounded an ICE vehicle that drove through the
crowd, banging on its windows. Prosecutors allege the vehicle’s
windshield wipers were damaged and someone scratched the word “PIG” into
its side, though none of the six were specifically accused of the
vandalism.
The indictment, which wasn’t made public for another week, alleged the
group conspired to “interrupt, hinder, and impede” a federal immigration
agent from the “discharge of his official duties.” Each of the
defendants were also charged with misdemeanor simple assault of a
federal officer, which does not require physical contact.
But the case began unraveling in March, when prosecutors dropped all
charges against two of the defendants. Defense attorneys began a more
aggressive campaign to discredit the charges, including a push to see
unredacted transcripts from the grand jury room.
On the same day U.S. District Judge April Perry called a hearing to ask
prosecutors for the unredacted transcripts in late April, prosecutors
made another surprise announcement: They’d decided to drop the felony
conspiracy charge. While defense attorneys framed it as a win for their
clients, they also suggested the feds’ move was a strategic way to avoid
having to hand over unredacted grand jury transcripts.
A few weeks later, Perry would agree.
Just days before the remaining defendants were set to face a rare
federal misdemeanor trial, the judge scheduled a closed-door hearing
during which she rebuked prosecutors for the apparent misconduct she
found while reading the unredacted grand jury transcripts and for having
previously obscured parts of the transcripts that would have revealed
the misconduct earlier.
[to top of second column]
|
The Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago (Capitol News Illinois
photo by Hannah Meisel) and U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. (Photo
courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice)
“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, according to a record of the sealed hearing she later made
public. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior
before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
After Perry canceled the trial, Boutros himself
appeared in her courtroom and took responsibility for former
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg’s alleged prosecutorial
misconduct. The judge all but accused Mecklenburg of inappropriate
“vouching” in which she put “her personal credibility and
trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges,” Perry said.
The prosecutor — who Durbin later fired from her new job — also
apparently asked grand jurors who did not support the government’s
case to not come back, and allegedly had improper contact with those
impaneled outside the grand jury room.
Boutros also asked the remaining charges in the case be dropped.
The U.S. attorney claimed he was only informed of the vouching and
improper communications with grand jurors late last month and told
Perry that the revelations prompted his late April decision to drop
the felony conspiracy charge against the four remaining defendants.
However, Boutros also revealed that he knew about — and took steps
to correct — the grand juror dismissals in the fall, which was
referred to in the report his office published Tuesday.
Road to sanctions
The report ended with a final defense of the U.S. attorney’s address
to the grand jury as a response to the “trying “ and “emotional”
times Boutros referred to in his brief speech, saying the
“importance of U.S. Attorney Boutros entering into the grand jury
cannot be overstated” due to the grand jury’s significance to the
criminal justice system.
“Grand juries unwilling to deliberate individually or as a
collective body, or unwilling to attend grand jury sessions at all,
or to receive evidence impartially without fear or favor, setting
aside personally biases, views, and passions, are a threat to the
rule of law and could mean that a district is operating in such a
way that federal criminal law cannot be enforced,” the report said.
“In such unchartered and unprecedented circumstances, extraordinary
measures may be required to restore the rule of law.”
But in a statement, attorneys for another former defendant, Andre
Martin, said the U.S. attorney’s statements Tuesday “raise more
questions than they answer,” a sentiment echoed in defense lawyers’
motion for attorneys’ fees.
Martin’s attorneys, Terence Campbell and Valerie Davenport, called
the “entire sequence” of the three grand jury sessions in October,
in addition to Boutros’ speech before the Oct. 23, 2025, grand jury
day “to say the least, highly unusual.”
In a lengthy footnote in Tuesday’s filing, defense attorneys wrote
that Boutros “may seek to deflect and pin the blame on a single
prosecutor” but that the judge “should not accept that convenient
excuse which is clearly meant to deflect, minimize, and contain.”
Tuesday’s filing also accused Boutros of dragging
his feet on dismissing the case despite knowing about the alleged
prosecutorial misconduct for months in the case of the grand jurors’
dismissals and for weeks after finding out about inappropriate
vouching and improper contact with grand jurors.
“Dismissal when faced with these sordid facts, however, cannot
absolve the government from its misconduct, nor immunize it from
providing further information about it,” the filing said.
The former defendants want “further targeted discovery” in the case.
Defense attorneys already asked last week that the U.S. attorney’s
office preserve all communications about the case. In the
closed-door hearing May 21, Perry told defense attorneys that she
would entertain briefings “and perhaps a hearing on the issue of
vindictive prosecution,” based on what she’d learned from the grand
jury transcripts.
Defense lawyers had already tried to proceed on a similar theory
earlier this year, but their claims were focused on whether the
Department of Justice had communications about the case with White
House officials. When prosecutors in March assured the judge there
weren’t, she dismissed the motion.
“We all took the government attorneys’ word on a great many things,”
the judge said, according to the transcript of the hearing she made
public later. “I, at the time, was operating on a presumption of
regular grand jury proceedings, which these were very clearly not.
So based upon what I’ve seen in the grand jury transcripts, the
calculus has changed and it has changed considerably.”
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state
government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is
funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R.
McCormick Foundation.
|
