The 'Broadview Six': a protest prosecution dismissed with prejudice after grand-jury misconduct

Editor's note: the court dismissed the case with prejudice after the judge found on the record that prosecutors had improper contacts with grand jurors and redacted them from the transcripts given to her.

On September 26, 2025, during Operation Midway Blitz, protesters outside the ICE processing facility in Broadview, Illinois surrounded a vehicle driven by a federal agent. Its windshield wipers were damaged and a word was scratched into its side, though the government has acknowledged it did not allege that any defendant committed those acts. From the crowd, six people were charged: a congressional candidate, a village trustee, a county board candidate, a ward committeeperson, a campaign worker, and a musician. Most were involved in local Democratic politics. The October 2025 indictment charged conspiracy to impede a federal agent, carrying up to seven years. Charges against two defendants were dropped in March 2026, and the felony count against the rest in April.

Obtaining the indictment had taken three grand-jury sessions. The first returned a no bill. The second ended abruptly during the ICE agent's testimony. In the second, according to transcripts later released by the court, the lead prosecutor excused a grand juror who had disparaged the case, and when another asked whether the government had unlimited tries, replied that she did not think they had to worry about that. Judge April Perry, a former federal prosecutor, found that a prosecutor had improperly vouched for her own credibility to support the charges, that there had been substantive communications with grand jurors outside the grand-jury room, and that dissenting grand jurors had been excused. She called the redaction of those passages from the transcripts given to her the most problematic issue of all.

On May 21, 2026, after a closed hearing, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros moved to dismiss all remaining charges with prejudice, and Judge Perry granted it. He said he had learned of the conduct three weeks earlier and did not believe his staff had intentionally misled the court; he then defended the prosecution, calling the protesters' conduct unacceptable in a civilized society, and Perry told him he was continuing to vilify the defendants. She told prosecutors that the presumption of regularity rested on a trust that had been broken. Boutros had said the previous month that politics played no part in his office's decisions. The dismissal rests on defects in the grand-jury process rather than on an acquittal or a judicial finding of vindictive prosecution, and that distinction is the reason this record does not assert one. The use-of-force findings arising from the same operation are documented at SUB-11.