ICE Protesters Push for Special Counsel to Investigate DOJ (1)

A group of anti-ICE protesters wants a special counsel appointed to investigate federal prosecutors’ handling of their case, which imploded last month after revelations of misconduct and sparked a crisis of credibility in the Chicago US attorney’s office.

An outside attorney is necessary to probe the “gross misconduct,” they said in a filing late Tuesday, and they should be empowered to investigate everyone from line prosecutors up to Northern District of Illinois US Attorney Andrew Boutros and high-level Justice Department officials.

Anything less than an independent investigation with a wide remit, they said, would concede to the government’s efforts to blame only the prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury, Sheri Mecklenburg.

“To not appoint a special prosecutor here would enable the government’s strategy to lay all that has happened on a single scapegoat, a convenient outcome for those who are eager to turn the page,” their motion says.

In a separate filing, attorneys for the protesters said the US attorney’s office won’t contest the protesters’ effort to have the government pay their legal fees.

According to that motion, government attorneys told defendants’ lawyers about that decision a day after they filed paperwork requesting disclosure of communications between the Chicago US attorney’s office and Washington officials, including aggressive senior DOJ official Aakash Singh.

“While Defendants welcome and accept the government’s commitment to pay their attorney’s fees and costs (in a precise amount to be determined), a cynical observer might suggest the government’s agreement to pay Defendants’ legal fees was made largely to avoid having to produce the requested discovery (which appears to have struck a nerve) and a full accounting of its conduct,” protesters’ attorneys said in a motion for a sanctions hearing.

The protester case was controversial from the start because many of the defendants were involved in local politics — one, Katherine Abughazaleh, ran in a Democratic congressional primary — and were outspoken against Trump’s agenda.

The six defendants were in a crowd of people accused of blocking a federal agent from driving toward an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in September as Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” was revving up in the Chicago area.

Grand jury transcripts made public last week revealed Mecklenburg repeatedly vouched for the strength of the evidence and, in a contentious exchange, dismissed a grand juror who said the case was a “crock of shit.” Only after Boutros himself appeared before grand jurors and asked if they could be impartial did they indict protesters on a felony conspiracy charge and misdemeanor counts of impeding an officer.

Charges against two of the six protesters were dropped altogether in March. Prosecutors later said they’d drop the felony conspiracy count against the remaining defendants — a decision Boutros later said he made in late April after learning about the vouching and other improprieties at the grand jury.

On the eve of trial, Judge April Perry agreed to the defense’s repeated requests to view unredacted grand jury transcripts. On May 21, she described the apparent misconduct from the bench, and said she was shocked that prosecutors had concealed it from her in the redacted versions they initially submitted. Boutros appeared in court later that day to dismiss the remaining charges.

The fallout has spread beyond the protester case, with multiple public officials calling for Boutros to resign.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, called for an investigation into Boutros, saying he and his team “corrupted and contaminated the deliberative process, hollowed out the protection that the Constitution guarantees and violated the would-be defendants’ right to due process.”

Raskin’s letter this week to DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission was first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.

In a statement, Boutros said the letter was “incomplete, ill-informed, and severely distorted” and that he supports OPR and the ARDC investigating.

“When they do so, we are confident that upon careful, unbiased consideration, neither entity will find misconduct by the United States Attorney because there was none,” he said.

Mecklenburg, meanwhile, lost her detail with the Senate Judiciary Committee the day after the case collapsed.

And defense attorneys in an unrelated fraud case said they learned about similar grand jury misconduct by Mecklenburg — prompting a judge to schedule an evidentiary hearing to probe the allegations. That hearing was averted when prosecutors agreed to drop charges against two of the defendants.

The case is United States v. Rabbitt, N.D. Ill., No. 1:25-cr-00693, motion for special counsel 6/16/26.