Federal prosecutors have struggled to convict anti-ICE protesters, while grand juries and judges are showing unusual skepticism of the government.
By Jamiles Lartey
The Marshall Project
https://www.themarshallproject.org/
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Federal prosecutors are used to winning cases.
In fiscal year 2024, when a federal criminal case reached a jury verdict, prosecutors won nearly 90% of the time, according to federal court data.
But in cases where the Department of Justice has attempted to convict protesters for felony assault on federal agents, the math looks very different. The government secured exactly zero felony convictions across 12 cases that went before a jury last year, according to reporting last week from The Associated Press. Those cases all ended in acquittals, mistrials or dismissals.
The analysis looked at the outcome of 102 arrests for felony assault on an officer made during anti-ICE protests last year in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon — all cities where President Donald Trump tried to deploy the National Guard during sustained protest activity.
The government didn’t fare much better in the cases that never reached a jury. The AP found that just 10 people among the 102 arrested pleaded guilty to felony assault, while 41% of the cases were dismissed and 34% were pleaded down to misdemeanors. Plea bargaining is the norm in federal courts, and prosecutors routinely agree to lesser charges. But the overall results for DOJ prosecutors are still unusually poor. In 2024, 82% of federal defendants charged with assault were ultimately convicted, either at trial or through a guilty plea. Among the protest cases the AP looked at, fewer than half were. Three additional cases are scheduled for later this year.
Grand juries have historically been an even easier audience for federal prosecutors. Unlike with trial juries, which assess a defendant’s guilt or innocence, grand jurors consider whether the government has enough evidence to formally charge someone with a crime. From 2007 to 2016, the last decade for which the federal government published relevant data, grand juries nationwide declined to indict an average of just 15 people a year, out of tens of thousands of annual cases.
But in Chicago alone, federal grand juries declined to indict at least three defendants arrested over alleged conduct during anti-ICE protests in the fall of 2025. Such rejections had been “virtually unheard of” before the immigration operation, according to Judge Gabriel Fuentes, a magistrate judge in the Northern District of Illinois.
Newly unsealed records offer a rare glimpse of just how skeptical some of those grand jurors were. The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this month that jurors repeatedly pressed prosecutors for evidence they hadn’t presented, including additional witnesses, cellphone and surveillance video, and medical records. In one of the cases the grand jury ultimately rejected, a prosecutor eventually told the court that the government could not “realistically obtain” everything the panel wanted.
It’s not clear why jurors have been reluctant to go along with prosecutors in these protest cases. In Chicago, the U.S. attorney in charge of the prosecutions suggested to Bloomberg Law that some of the grand jury defeats were “clear instances of straight jury nullification.” This occurs when jurors conclude that prosecutors have met the appropriate legal threshold for an indictment or conviction, but vote against them anyway, because they reject the premise of the underlying law or the government’s decision to invoke it.
