U.S. attorney acknowledges speech to ‘Broadview 6’ grand jury as calls for his resignation mount

CHICAGO — Nearly two weeks after missteps by federal prosecutors compelled U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to personally appear in court to drop charges against the remaining “Broadview Six” protesters, Boutros on Tuesday acknowledged having spoken to the October grand jury that would go on to indict the group later that day.

The U.S. attorney’s office framed the acknowledgement, contextualized in a five-page “special report,” as a direct rebuttal to a defense attorney’s assertion last week that Boutros himself had “personal contact” with the grand jury.

Read more: ‘Broadview 6’ trial canceled as prosecutors acknowledge misconduct before grand jury | ‘Broadview 6’ defense accuses Chicago’s top federal prosecutor of having contact with grand jury

Instead, the report explained that Boutros decided to address three ongoing grand juries “given prior grand jury disturbances and potential tension”  on Oct. 16, 2025, when the lead prosecutor excused grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s case against the protesters.

It was prosecutors’ second time presenting the evidence; the previous week, a separate grand jury had refused to indict the protesters. Federal grand juries in Chicago declined to indict at least four other immigration protesters this past fall, according to ongoing tracking and previous reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times.

On the morning of what would be the feds’ third try presenting evidence about the Broadview Six, on Oct. 23, 2025, the U.S. attorney appeared in front of the grand jury “to remind the grand jurors of their obligations under the law and the role they play in our constitutional form of government,” according to the special report. Boutros also gave a similar four-minute speech to two other ongoing grand juries that week, around the same time of the Trump administration’s Chicago-focused “Operation Midway Blitz” mass deportation campaign.

“If there’s anyone here who is struggling with a certain type of cases, such as the immigration cases or other cases where they do not believe that they can set aside their personal — their personal emotions, that they cannot listen and deliberate honestly and objectively, I would ask that you raise your hand and identify yourself, because we have a different procedure for that,” Boutros said.

Apparently, no one raised their hand.

But Chris Parente, a lawyer for one of the former defendants, Oak Park village trustee Brian Straw, insisted Boutros’ speech did constitute “personal contact” with the grand jury. In a statement, the attorney pointed to the U.S. attorney’s remark that there would be a “different procedure” for those with “personal feelings on immigration cases” just one week after the prosecutor “dismissed grand jurors who voiced dissent” seeing the same evidence in the Broadview Six case.

“Of all days for the U.S. Attorney to make a rare appearance before the grand jury, that he would be present on the day he likely knew this case would be re-presented speaks for itself,” Parente said.

Two hours after Boutros’ office published his report, the former defendants filed the first of what’s expected to be multiple motions for sanctions against the feds, this time demanding the U.S. Department of Justice pay attorneys’ fees, claiming “wide-ranging misconduct” by prosectors in their case.

Also on Tuesday, Illinois’ U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth jointly called on Boutros to resign, saying his office “has been riddled with chaos, deep internal dysfunction, and alleged misconduct.” The resignation request follows Durbin’s announcement last month that the former lead prosecutor in the Broadview Six case had been fired from her new job representing the DOJ as counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Read more: After misconduct accusation in ‘Broadview 6’ case, former lead prosecutor fired from new D.C. job

A case unravels

After being presented with evidence about the six protesters’ actions on Sept. 26, 2025, outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Chicago’s near-west suburb of Broadview, the grand jury indicted them on a rare felony conspiracy charge. The group, along with dozens of others, surrounded an ICE vehicle that drove through the crowd, banging on its windows. Prosecutors allege the vehicle’s windshield wipers were damaged and someone scratched the word “PIG” into its side, though none of the six were specifically accused of the vandalism.

The indictment, which wasn’t made public for another week, alleged the group conspired to “interrupt, hinder, and impede” a federal immigration agent from the “discharge of his official duties.” Each of the defendants were also charged with misdemeanor simple assault of a federal officer, which does not require physical contact.

Read more: ‘Broadview Six’ plead not guilty to charges of ‘impeding’ agents outside ICE facility | Charges dismissed for 2 of ‘Broadview 6’ ICE facility protesters

But the case began unraveling in March, when prosecutors dropped all charges against two of the defendants. Defense attorneys began a more aggressive campaign to discredit the charges, including a push to see unredacted transcripts from the grand jury room.

On the same day U.S. District Judge April Perry called a hearing to ask prosecutors for the unredacted transcripts in late April, prosecutors made another surprise announcement: They’d decided to drop the felony conspiracy charge. While defense attorneys framed it as a win for their clients, they also suggested the feds’ move was a strategic way to avoid having to hand over unredacted grand jury transcripts.

Read more: Conspiracy charge dismissed for ‘Broadview 6’ as other ICE protesters sue over DNA collection | ‘Broadview 6’ defense accuses feds of keeping grand jury transcripts secret, reneging on dropping conspiracy charge | Feds say they’ll drop conspiracy charge against remaining ‘Broadview Six’ protesters

A few weeks later, Perry would agree.

Just days before the remaining defendants were set to face a rare federal misdemeanor trial, the judge scheduled a closed-door hearing during which she rebuked prosecutors for the apparent misconduct she found while reading the unredacted grand jury transcripts and for having previously obscured parts of the transcripts that would have revealed the misconduct earlier.

“I have read hundreds — if not thousands — of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” Perry said, according to a record of the sealed hearing she later made public. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

Read more: Remaining ‘Broadview Six’ protesters set for rare federal misdemeanor trial next week

After Perry canceled the trial, Boutros himself appeared in her courtroom and took responsibility for former Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg’s alleged prosecutorial misconduct. The judge all but accused Mecklenburg of inappropriate “vouching” in which she put “her personal credibility and trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges,” Perry said. The prosecutor — who Durbin later fired from her new job — also apparently asked grand jurors who did not support the government’s case to not come back, and allegedly had improper contact with those impaneled outside the grand jury room.

Boutros also asked the remaining charges in the case be dropped.

The U.S. attorney claimed he was only informed of the vouching and improper communications with grand jurors late last month and told Perry that the revelations prompted his late April decision to drop the felony conspiracy charge against the four remaining defendants.

However, Boutros also revealed that he knew about — and took steps to correct — the grand juror dismissals in the fall, which was referred to in the report his office published Tuesday.

Road to sanctions

The report ended with a final defense of the U.S. attorney’s address to the grand jury as a response to the “trying “ and “emotional” times Boutros referred to in his brief speech, saying the “importance of U.S. Attorney Boutros entering into the grand jury cannot be overstated” due to the grand jury’s significance to the criminal justice system.

“Grand juries unwilling to deliberate individually or as a collective body, or unwilling to attend grand jury sessions at all, or to receive evidence impartially without fear or favor, setting aside personally biases, views, and passions, are a threat to the rule of law and could mean that a district is operating in such a way that federal criminal law cannot be enforced,” the report said. “In such unchartered and unprecedented circumstances, extraordinary measures may be required to restore the rule of law.”

But in a statement, attorneys for another former defendant, Andre Martin, said the U.S. attorney’s statements Tuesday “raise more questions than they answer,” a sentiment echoed in defense lawyers’ motion for attorneys’ fees.

Martin’s attorneys, Terence Campbell and Valerie Davenport, called the “entire sequence” of the three grand jury sessions in October, in addition to Boutros’ speech before the Oct. 23, 2025, grand jury day “to say the least, highly unusual.”

In a lengthy footnote in Tuesday’s filing, defense attorneys wrote that Boutros “may seek to deflect and pin the blame on a single prosecutor” but that the judge “should not accept that convenient excuse which is clearly meant to deflect, minimize, and contain.”

Tuesday’s filing also accused Boutros of dragging his feet on dismissing the case despite knowing about the alleged prosecutorial misconduct for months in the case of the grand jurors’ dismissals and for weeks after finding out about inappropriate vouching and improper contact with grand jurors.

“Dismissal when faced with these sordid facts, however, cannot absolve the government from its misconduct, nor immunize it from providing further information about it,” the filing said.

The former defendants want “further targeted discovery” in the case. Defense attorneys already asked last week that the U.S. attorney’s office preserve all communications about the case. In the closed-door hearing May 21, Perry told defense attorneys that she would entertain briefings “and perhaps a hearing on the issue of vindictive prosecution,” based on what she’d learned from the grand jury transcripts.

Defense lawyers had already tried to proceed on a similar theory earlier this year, but their claims were focused on whether the Department of Justice had communications about the case with White House officials. When prosecutors in March assured the judge there weren’t, she dismissed the motion.

“We all took the government attorneys’ word on a great many things,” the judge said, according to the transcript of the hearing she made public later. “I, at the time, was operating on a presumption of regular grand jury proceedings, which these were very clearly not. So based upon what I’ve seen in the grand jury transcripts, the calculus has changed and it has changed considerably.”

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