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In yet another overreaching and nakedly political prosecution, the Justice Department on Wednesday indicted Democratic Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh on federal charges for taking part in a nonviolent protest outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Chicago.
The government claims that Abughazaleh, alongside five other protesters, “impeded and interfered with an officer of the United States.” All six protesters are also charged together as alleged members of a “conspiracy” to prevent the officer from discharging his duties.
Let’s be clear: If six people nonviolently protesting outside a government facility constitutes a criminal conspiracy, all First Amendment-protected activity is at risk.
The particular conspiracy charge the Chicago protesters face — conspiracy to impede a United States officer — “was one of the main charges used against January 6th insurrection defendants,” noted civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo on Bluesky. The attempted coup that day had been marked by serious violence: An estimated 140 police officers were injured at the Capitol.
The alleged conspiracy in Abughazaleh’s case?
All six people facing charges were part of a September protest outside ICE’s Broadview Processing Center. At the demonstration, a federal agent was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed,” the indictment said, so as not to mow down protesters. The vehicle reportedly incurred minor damage.
A federal agent was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed,” the indictment said.
Now the protesters are facing a possible six-year prison sentence for it.
Footage from that day showed federal agents firing pepper balls and tear gas at demonstrators. One officer grabbed Abughazaleh and threw her hard to the ground.
Evidence abounds of ICE and other federal agents’ brutality as the deportation machine escalates in Chicago and nationwide. Agents are tear-gassing residential areas in order to kidnap immigrant neighbors, regularly assaulting protesters, violently raiding whole apartment buildings among other indiscriminate, racist sweeps, and chasing immigrants workers to their deaths.
Whatever comes to pass in the case against Abughazaleh and the other protesters, to impede such inhumanity is to stand on the right side of history.
Trump’s Brute Force Lawfare
Meritless, malicious prosecutions aimed at collective punishment and the chilling of dissent are now standard practice for Donald Trump’s Justice Department. It is a brute force approach to lawfare, with ample likelihood of pushback in the courts.
Indeed, the federal charges facing Abughazaleh come as no surprise from a loyalist Justice Department openly engaged in targeting the president’s political opponents.
The groundless effort to frame a typical demonstration as a conspiracy is also part of an ongoing regime project to criminalize opposition protest, tout court. The point is to further normalize treating protesters as criminals.
Trump has been unabashed about his desire to weaponize conspiracy charges against his perceived enemies. With a mixture of cynicism and delusion, Trump and his Cabinet have embraced a worldview in which all protesters and opposition candidates form a well-funded criminal — if not terrorist — network, deserving of prosecution as such.
After protesters interrupted the president during a dinner in Washington, Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into bringing RICO charges — originally designed to pursue organized mafia crime — against one of the demonstrators; repeating a now common refrain, Trump said the protester was a “paid agitator.”
The president’s absurd designation of antifa as a terrorist organization, not to mention his antisemitic obsession with targeting billionaire George Soros for supposedly funding all left-wing protest activity, all follow the same authoritarian, conspiratorial logic.
As I’ve noted, from the mass prosecution of Trump’s first inauguration protesters to racketeering charges against the Stop Cop City movement, government attempts to collectively criminalize protesters have consistently failed to win convictions. The prosecutions themselves have nonetheless drained movement resources and spread fear.
“We now have legal fees on top of our campaign expenses,” noted Abughazaleh, who entered the congressional race as a long-shot candidate with a grassroots campaign, but is currently polling in a close second place to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss.
“This administration has resorted to weaponizing the federal justice system to scare us into silence,” she said. “There are plenty of reasons to be afraid right now, but we have to overcome that fear.”
