Federal prosecutors drop all charges against Chicago 'Broadview Six' over grand jury misconduct

On May 21, 2026, Andrew Boutros, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, appeared before U.S. District Judge April Perry and moved to dismiss with prejudice all remaining charges against the four defendants known as the "Broadview Six." The defendants had been criminally charged over a September 2025 demonstration outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview, Illinois — one of the highest-profile criminal cases to emerge from "Operation Midway Blitz," the Trump administration's mass immigration-enforcement surge in the Chicago area. Indicted in October 2025 on a felony conspiracy count, the defendants — among them congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, Oak Park village trustee Brian Straw, and 45th Ward Democratic committeeperson Michael Rabbitt — had been left facing a single misdemeanor count of impeding a federal agent after the conspiracy charge was dropped and the cases against two of the original six defendants were abandoned. Dismissal with prejudice means the charges cannot be refiled.

The dismissal followed a closed-door hearing in which Judge Perry reviewed the grand jury transcripts that produced the indictment. According to defense counsel and the judge's own account, prosecutors improperly "vouched" for the strength of the evidence before the grand jury, engaged in substantive communications with grand jurors outside the grand jury room, failed to disclose that an initial grand jury had returned a "No True Bill" refusing to indict, re-presented the case after excluding grand jurors who had disagreed with the government, and redacted entire pages of transcript without informing the court. Perry, who said she had reviewed thousands of grand jury transcripts over her career, said she had never seen prosecutorial conduct this severe, and indicated that a separate hearing on sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and ethical violations could follow. In court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Skiba identified former Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenberg, who had left the office earlier in 2026, as the lead prosecutor responsible for the grand jury conduct.

The event recorded here is the prosecution itself, not its dismissal. A federal U.S. Attorney's office brought a criminal case against people for taking part in a First Amendment-protected protest of immigration enforcement, and several of the defendants were political figures and administration critics — conduct that maps to the prosecution of protected speech and to the use of government power against critics. The manner in which the indictment was obtained — re-presenting the matter after a grand jury declined to indict and removing dissenting grand jurors — is conduct the presiding judge characterized as the worst she had encountered, and it describes how the targeted case was pursued. The dismissal, and any sanctions proceeding that follows, represent the court and the prosecution correcting the record; what this entry documents is that the prosecution was brought and maintained at all. Defense counsel has signaled a motion for sanctions, and a sanctions hearing with testimony from the prosecutors involved may warrant a follow-up entry.

Updates

2026-07-19 — Prosecutors departed Chicago U.S. Attorney's office over failed cases [6, 7]

The New York Times reported that all seven heads of the U.S. Attorney's office criminal division's sections, along with many of their successors and deputies, departed within a year, with veteran prosecutors saying they felt pressured into pursuing immigration-enforcement cases — including the Broadview Six prosecution — that ultimately failed. More than 100 former federal prosecutors separately signed a letter stating that "actions taken by leadership in the last year have tarnished the reputation" of the office, criticizing U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros's role in the deterioration.