In LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, Trump attempted to divide and weaken the movement by securing hundreds of indictments against individual activists for interfering with an ICE agent, destroying federal property, or similar crimes.<\/p>\n
From the beginning, the scope, size, and determination of the protests frustrated ICE\u2019s attempt to repress them. To begin with, despite the massive deployments, ICE did not have enough agents to control the crowds, detain the immigrants, and arrest the protesters whom they claimed had violated the law. Agents, moreover, had great difficulty in identifying and recording which individual had committed which allegedly criminal act. To overcome that difficulty, the ICE agents, who were untrained, incompetent, brutal, and dishonest, arrested first and came up with charges later. Occasionally, official or cell-phone videos confirmed what the agents said, but most often they revealed that the agent had erred or lied.<\/p>\n
The U.S. attorneys were supposed to review the charges that any officer reported, but many of those attorneys had resigned in protest. Some of the remaining U.S. attorneys dismissed dishonest or unsubstantiated charges, but under relentless pressure from above, most sought indictments from the grand juries on weak or non-existent cases. As the cases wound their way ahead, many U.S. attorneys would have been happy to proceed to trial except for the fact that the judges and, even more, the juries were increasingly skeptical of any charge that ICE had filed.<\/p>\n
Pressure from the defendants, the defense lawyers, and the movement increased the pressure on the prosecution. Many defendants turned down plea deals despite the risk of going to trial. The defense often filed numerous motions seeking dismissal, and in many cases, members of the movement showed up in court for the crucial proceedings.<\/p>\n
In criminal cases that do not involve ICE, 90 percent of federal indictments end up in a guilty plea or verdict. But after an extensive investigation of 400 cases in which protesters were charged with assaulting or impeding ICE agents, the New York Times<\/a> found that half of those cases ended in acquittals or dismissals and that many of the others were pled down to misdemeanors. Significantly, of the 26 cases that went to trial before a jury, 22 were acquitted.<\/p>\n Similarly, ProPublica and Frontline reported that the federal government arrested 132 U.S. citizens in southern California for interfering with or assaulting ICE agents, but only 32 were convicted, and most of those had been convicted when they pleaded to misdemeanors. In fact, the federal defenders in Southern California won six straight acquittals<\/a>\u2014an unheard-of event\u2014because juries simply did not believe ICE agents, including Greg Bovino. Likewise, after a jury had acquitted a professor at California State on a charge of aggravated assault against an ICE agent, the California Faculty Association reported<\/a> that as of April 16, 2026, the U.S. attorney in LA had filed over a hundred charges against anti-ICE protesters and still had not convicted a single one for assaulting an ICE officer.<\/p>\n The same was true in Chicago. According to the same ProPublica and Frontline report<\/a>, the government dropped charges in 75 of the 109 arrests of protesters against ICE.<\/p>\n If anything, the government did worse in Minneapolis. Early in ICE\u2019s occupation of the city, Kristi Noem published \u201cwanted posters\u201d for 16 protesters who had supposedly interfered with ICE agents. But as Minnesota Public Radio reported,<\/a> of the 36 protesters charged with interfering with ICE officers (including the 16 on Noem\u2019s list), the U.S. attorney dropped 18 and offered 11 others a deal to dismiss their cases in 18 months if they had no further offenses.<\/p>\n While there are no official statistics, the New York Times found that of the 26 cases of ICE protesters who went to trial before a jury, the jury found 22 were not guilty.<\/p>\n There is also a great deal of anecdotal evidence of the juries\u2019 opposition to ICE in the New York Times and ProPublica reports, but two cases, one from Chicago and the other from LA, express what juries thought of the ICE campaign.<\/p>\n In the Chicago case, a man had posted an online picture of Greg Bovino above a caption which read: \u201c10K if U take him down.\u201d The government charged the poster with attempted murder-for-hire and, at trial, called him \u201ca ruthless member of the Latin Kings.\u201d But after the jury heard the evidence, it acquitted the man. In response, Steven Miller issued a statement<\/a> saying that \u201cleftist judges and juries were empowering violent insurrection against the government,\u201d but his racist sputtering could not reverse the verdict.<\/p>\n Similarly, in Los Angeles, the government charged a tow truck driver with interference with ICE officers when he mistakenly towed an ICE vehicle away from a scene where the agents were attempting to arrest an undocumented immigrant from Colombia. Once again, the jury acquitted the defendant, and once again Miller issued a public statement<\/a> saying it was \u201canother example of blatant jury nullification in a blue city.\u201d<\/p>\n Even in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, the government obtained some convictions, although often on lesser offenses. However, even those who were ultimately exonerated suffered financial and personal harm from the prosecutions. Even so, there were so many acquittals and dismissals that the government\u2019s prosecution of individual protesters in those cities barely made a dent in the growing movement against ICE and Trump.<\/p>\n As stated, Bondi directed the FBI and the U.S. attorneys to consider charging anti-ICE activists with substantive offenses and conspiracy to commit those offenses because that would make it possible to prosecute those who planned the event and to double the penalties for anyone who committed an unlawful act.<\/p>\n From LA forward, the Justice Department was zealous<\/a> in filing conspiracy charges, but almost immediately, the need to prove an \u201cexplicit or implicit\u201d agreement to commit an unlawful act opened a weakness in those charges. If there were no electronic or other written statements suggesting such an agreement, a sympathetic jury could find defendants not guilty of the conspiracy charge if it concluded that there was either no agreement or that the agreement was limited to an agreement to carry out a lawful protest.<\/p>\n In the early days of the LA protests, the regime nevertheless stormed ahead with its conspiracy charges. Thus, in the first few days of the rebellion, Alex Jones (yes, that Alex Jones) provided the government with a video of a Latino man standing on the back of a truck, handing out water and face shields to crowds who had been gassed by ICE. Almost immediately, the government obtained search warrants, and ICE agents, surrounded by National Guard troops, used flash bangs to storm into his home and arrest him for conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents. When it turned out that the man was just a lone Good Samaritan, the government was forced to dismiss all charges against him and to incur months of adverse publicity<\/p>\n Similarly, on the first day of the occupation of LA, ICE agents arrested David Huerta<\/a>, the President of California SEIU, for conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents because he had sat down by himself on a driveway outside a garment factory where ICE was conducting a raid.\u00a0 Since the only agreement that he had was with himself, the government was forced to drop the conspiracy charge. Months later, it was also forced to drop the charge of interfering with an ICE officer because Huerta had not interfered with anyone.<\/p>\nTrump\u2019s conspiracy indictments.<\/h4>\n