CHICAGO — After accusations flew in dueling legal filings earlier this week, a federal judge on Thursday officially dismissed the main conspiracy charge against the remaining “Broadview Six” immigration protesters indicted last fall.

A scheduled May 26 trial on the remaining misdemeanor counts is still moving forward, but U.S. District Judge April Perry noted the gravity of the moment in a brief hearing.

“Congratulations, you all are no longer charged with felonies,” she told the four remaining defendants.

The group, which includes former congressional candidate Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, was indicted in October in connection with a Sept. 26, 2025, demonstration outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the near-west Chicago suburb of Broadview.

The protest came at the height of demonstrations outside the Broadview facility just a few weeks into the Trump administration’s Chicago-focused “Operation Midway Blitz” mass deportation campaign. In those early weeks, the ICE facility was the epicenter of protests against the president’s immigration policies — and the resulting arrests of demonstrators.

Many arrested protesters were subjected to cheek swabs before they were either released or charged. In a new lawsuit filed Wednesday, four of those protesters sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security alleging the DNA collected on those cheek swabs and their entry into a federal government database violated their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

In their complaint, first reported by the New York Times, the protesters claimed the DNA collection “is part of a surveillance program that targets people for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Conspiracy charge dropped

Social media video of the Sept. 26 protest posted by Abughazaleh, an influencer-turned-congressional candidate, captured the moment she and dozens of others surrounded an ICE vehicle that drove through the demonstrating crowd, banging on its windows. Prosecutors allege unidentified members of the crowd broke the SUV’s windshield wipers and scratched the word “PIG” onto a door.

A month later, Abughazaleh and five others were charged with an overarching count of felony conspiracy, which alleged they conspired to “interrupt, hinder, and impede” a federal immigration agent from the “discharge of his official duties.” They were also each individually charged with misdemeanor simple assault of a federal officer, which does not require physical contact.

In a surprise move last week, prosecutors said they would drop the conspiracy charge. While defense attorneys characterized it as a win for their clients, they also suggested it was a strategic move to evade a judicial order to reveal unredacted transcripts of the three separate grand jury proceedings that led to the October indictment.

But when the feds had not yet formally moved to dismiss the conspiracy charge a few days later, defense attorneys got their hackles up, alleging in a pair of motions Monday that the government was going back on its word and was trying to “have its cake and eat it, too” by holding off on an official dismissal request until after the trial.

In response Wednesday, prosecutors shot back that defense attorneys were “histrionically” perceiving a normal practice as “nefarious.” Even so, they moved to dismiss the conspiracy count earlier than they’d planned.

“In order to alleviate defendants’ stated concerns, and avoid what would surely be further unnecessary and time-consuming litigation, not to mention a waste of this court’s resources, the government hereby formally moves to dismiss Count One of the original indictment with prejudice,” the feds wrote.

Grand jury transcripts

Prosecutors already dropped all charges against two defendants in March. But the group still includes Abughazaleh, her deputy campaign manager, Andre Martin, Chicago 45th Ward Democratic Committeeman Michael Rabbitt, and Oak Park Trustee Brian Straw. Dropping the conspiracy count and refiling the misdemeanor charges represent a further winnowing down of the case.

Though Perry last appeared to agree with prosecutors’ assertion that the grand jury transcripts would be a moot issue after the conspiracy charge was dropped, as grand juries don’t consider misdemeanors, the judge on Thursday said she’d deal with the issue later this month.

Chris Parente, an attorney for Straw, told the judge that it would only take “two lines” in the transcript to prove possible prosecutorial misconduct in the grand jury proceedings.

“They’re playing some sort of weird shell game,” he told reporters after Thursday’s hearing, referring to prosecutors’ tight guard on the grand jury transcripts. “It’s just inappropriate for a courtroom.”

Cheek swab lawsuit

While none of the “Broadview Six” were arrested, dozens of other protesters outside the Broadview facility were, including the four plaintiffs who sued Wednesday over having their cheeks swabbed while detained. According to their lawsuit, the collection of their DNA is the latest step in the unconstitutional expansion of the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, over the last two decades.

CODIS, which was launched by the FBI in the late 1990s, enables the comparison of DNA profiles of convicted offenders across local, state and national databases. According to an official congressional analysis of a 2000 law updating CODIS’ authority, the combined database was meant to be used “in solving murders, sexually violent offenses, and other crimes.”

But the lawsuit alleges that over time, the federal government “has expanded both the amount of genetic information included in the CODIS database and the purposes for which that information may be used, moving beyond the original identification-based model,” according to the complaint.

The number of DNA profiles uploaded to CODIS had already increased sevenfold from around 2 million in 2004 to approximately 14 million in a decade later — a figure that nearly doubled to 27 million as of November 2025, according to the complaint. But the lawsuit alleges CODIS’ volume is increasingly exponentially under the Trump administration, citing the FBI’s own reporting that it’s “currently collecting almost 150,000 DNA profiles monthly — or approximately 1,800,000 per year.”

Two of the four plaintiffs were arrested, had their cheeks swabbed but were never charged. The other two were charged but prosecutors eventually dropped the cases.

“The federal government has been wrongfully arresting peaceful protesters, collecting their DNA, uploading their genetic profiles to government databases, and storing their DNA samples in federal labs — permanently,” the lawsuit said. “That is what happened to Plaintiffs, as a result of exercising their First Amendment right to criticize federal policy.”

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.