CHICAGO — Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, a Democratic candidate for Illinois 9th Congressional District, is among six people indicted for allegedly “impeding” a federal immigration agent during a protest last month outside a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility.
The charges are contained in an 11-page federal indictment made public Wednesday accusing the group of conspiring to “interrupt, hinder, and impede” the agent from the “discharge of his official duties” on the morning of Sept. 26. The confrontation marked the height of protests outside the ICE processing facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview in the weeks after the Trump administration launched “Operation Midway Blitz,” a still-ongoing immigration enforcement campaign that has so far resulted in the arrests of more than 3,000 people.
Others charged include Cook County Board candidate Catherine “Cat” Sharp, 45th Ward Democratic Committeeman Michael Rabbitt, and Oak Park Village Board Trustee Brian Straw, all Democrats. They are set for arraignment next week.
During the episode, Abughazaleh and the other defendants — along with roughly two dozen others — surrounded a government vehicle the agent was attempting to drive inside the ICE facility’s perimeter and “banged aggressively” on its hood and windows. The vehicle’s side mirror and windshield wiper were broken during the confrontation, and the word “PIG” was etched into its side, according to the indictment.
Video of the incident, posted to the social media accounts Abughazaleh developed as a progressive activist and conservative media critic before launching her congressional campaign, shows the candidate in front of the vehicle as the agent drove slowly through the crowd.
In addition to the felony conspiracy charge, Abughazaleh and her co-defendants are each charged with misdemeanor simple assault of a federal officer, which does not require physical contact.
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge April Perry, who has blocked the Trump administration from deploying National Guard troops to Chicago, which the White House claims is necessary due to “violent” protests. But Perry said the feds’ narrative of the protests has been “unreliable.”
Read more: Judge’s block on deploying National Guard extended indefinitely as Supreme Court weighs case | Judge calls feds ‘unreliable,’ temporarily blocks National Guard deployment to Illinois
Responding to the unsealed indictment Wednesday, Abughazaleh called it “a political prosecution and a gross attempt to silence dissent” by “weaponizing the federal justice system.”
“As I and others have exercised our First Amendment rights, ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls and tear gassed hundreds protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors and terrorizing us cannot be our new normal," she said in a video posted to social media.
A federal judge earlier this month issued a temporary restraining order restricting agents’ use of riot control weapons like tear gas after protesters, journalists and clergy filed a lawsuit over the deployment of tear gas, pepper balls and other crowd-control tactics outside the Broadview facility.
But even as protests outside the ICE facility have calmed, clashes between U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents and civilians in Chicago neighborhoods have resulted in multiple deployments of tear gas in the last week. To account for the alleged violations of her order, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis summoned Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino into her courtroom Tuesday and ordered him to report for daily check-ins for the next week. But the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday stayed the order requiring Bovino to appear daily.
Read more: Bovino ordered to make daily court appearances after three days of tear gas in Chicago | Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino ordered to testify in federal court
Abughazaleh isn’t the only congressional candidate who’s had a run-in with immigration agents since Operation Midway Blitz began. Earlier this month, state Rep. Hoan Huynh, D-Chicago, who is also running for the 9th District, said a Border Patrol agent pointed a gun at him while he warned residents of Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood of immigration enforcement activity nearby. Yet another 9th District candidate, Evanston Mayor Dan Biss, was tear gassed while protesting in Broadview last month. In a statement Wednesday, Biss called the charges against his opponent “frivolous” and said they should be “dropped immediately.”
Straw, the charged Oak Park trustee, said the Trump administration made a “decision to seemingly hand-pick public officials like me for standing up against these inhumane policies.” Through his attorney, he said he would “fight these baseless charges.”
State Rep. Lisa Hernandez, chair of the Democratic Party of Illinois, said the indictment was representative of “a hypocritical, tear-gas-loving Administration run on violence, political punishment and suffocating the First Amendment.”
“In this country, protesters are allowed to tell their government, 'No, we will not stand by and just watch while you disappear our neighbors,'" she said.
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.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
