Lawyer Loses Senate Role as ICE Protest Case Fallout Grows (2)

A longtime prosecutor’s detail to the Senate Judiciary Committee was terminated, and defense attorneys began preparing for sanctions hearings following revelations of apparent misconduct at grand jury proceedings in a prominent federal case against anti-ICE protesters.

Former federal prosecutors said they were surprised at the allegations about prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois, an office that has long prided itself on high standards.

“The office does have this reputation of really being very, very upstanding and really focused on the facts and the law and being apolitical in the way that they operate,” said Sharon Fairley, a former Northern District prosecutor who teaches at University of Chicago Law School. “So I worry that the office’s reputation may suffer from this.”

The case against four protesters was dismissed on the cusp of trial Thursday after a closed-door hearing at which Judge April Perry said her trust in prosecutors had been broken.

There were “improper prosecutorial communications” with grand jurors outside the jury room; a prosecutor personally vouched for the strength of the case; and grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s case were excused from deliberating, Perry said, according to a transcript of the hearing that was later unsealed. What’s more, she said, prosecutors redacted evidence of that conduct from the transcripts they initially submitted for her review.

While mistakes sometimes are made at the grand jury, “it is unusual to have a combination of things like this happen, and particularly happen in a high-profile case,” said Mark Chutkow, former head of the criminal division at the US attorney’s office in Detroit now in private practice. “They were pretty fundamental mistakes that most AUSAs should know crossed the line.”

Sheri Mecklenburg was lead prosecutor on the case until she was detailed to the Judiciary Committee in February. A spokesperson for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Friday the committee didn’t directly employ Mecklenburg, but “because of the gravity of the charges in this case” her detail was terminated.

The statement said Durbin’s office had no knowledge of the allegations until they became public Thursday and called the prosecution “deeply flawed.”

Mecklenburg remains employed by DOJ, a US attorney’s office spokesperson said. Attempts to reach Mecklenburg for comment Friday were unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, attorneys for defendant Brian Straw on Friday asked Perry to make sure prosecutors preserve all communications related to the grand jury proceedings and the decisions to redact the transcripts. They have “no doubt that severe sanctions will be forthcoming,” said the motion.

Prosecutors responded that there was no standing to make that request because the case has been dismissed.

Midway Blitz

The case against the protesters was brought to the grand jury in the fall, during the thick of the Trump administration’s aggressive Chicago-area deportation campaign known as “Operation Midway Blitz.” They were accused of blocking a federal agent from driving toward an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the Chicago suburbs.

Six people were initially charged with felony conspiracy and misdemeanor charges of impeding a federal officer. Charges against two of them were dropped altogether in March, and prosecutors later dropped the conspiracy charge against the four remaining defendants. Northern District US Attorney Andrew Boutros said in court Thursday the felony dismissal was his decision after he learned of the behavior at the grand jury.

In a statement Friday, Boutros said the office also “proactively initiated an immediate review of those grand jury presentations that could have been impacted in a similar fashion. That review is ongoing.”

Boutros himself dismissed the remaining misdemeanor charges Thursday but said protesters’ conduct was “unacceptable in a civilized society.”

It’s crucial for prosecutors to act ethically at the grand jury, where there’s no judge or defense attorney to check them, said Ronald Safer, former criminal division chief in the Northern District now in private practice.

Without seeing the grand jury transcripts, it’s hard to know precisely what occurred, Safer noted. But “virtually everything that this office did with regard to Operation Midway Blitz has damaged the credibility of this office,” he said. “In the eyes of the public, and in the community of lawyers who know what the Department of Justice should be.”

Non-immigration charges related to Midway Blitz have generally fared poorly in court. Prosecutors dismissed charges against numerous other protesters, including after grand juries declined to indict. In one case, prosecutors dismissed charges against Marimar Martinez, who survived being shot multiple times by a Border Patrol agent. A man accused of putting a hit on a Border Patrol official was acquitted.

Prosecutorial Behavior

Mecklenburg wasn’t in court Thursday, but her name was mentioned by another prosecutor who’d worked on the case, according to the unsealed transcript.

Assistant US Attorney Matthew Skiba acknowledged that Mecklenburg was “not here to defend herself,” then said he was at the grand jury with a “senior veteran.”

Skiba said he wasn’t trying to “deflect blame” but he’d only joined the office in July and the case was just his second time before a grand jury.

“I remember what you referred to as the vouching incident,” he told Perry. “I remember thinking at the time that I would never make that statement as a matter of personal style. What I did not know then, and what only became apparent as we were discussing dismissing these charges, is that’s beyond personal style, and that is, at a minimum, arguably misconduct.”

Perry, a former federal prosecutor, had inspected unredacted versions of grand jury transcripts for the first time earlier in the week after persistent requests from defense attorneys, who suspected flaws at the proceedings could provide grounds to throw out the case.

“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several US Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” Perry said, according to the hearing transcript. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

The case is United States v. Rabbitt, N.D. Ill., No. 1:25-cr-00693.