Andrew Boutros, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who has been ordered to testify about the Broadview Six grand jury. Official Justice Department portrait (public domain).
A federal judge in Chicago has ordered the Broadview Six prosecutors, the region’s top federal prosecutor and three of his assistants, to testify under oath about their handling of the grand jury that indicted six ICE protesters, rejecting a Justice Department request to narrow or drop the inquiry. U.S. District Judge April Perry’s order, issued Nov. 11, keeps alive a rare court examination of whether prosecutors misled a judge in a case built on a protest outside an ICE processing facility, as Fox News and Law360 reported.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and Assistant U.S. Attorneys William Hogan, Matthew Skiba and Andres Almendarez are due to appear Monday, Nov. 16, according to Fox News. Perry wants answers on what prosecutors knew about possible misconduct before the grand jury, whether their statements to the court were accurate, why grand jury transcripts were redacted, and whether anyone outside the U.S. Attorney’s Office received information about the investigation, Fox reported. The outlet said she is weighing whether sanctions or criminal contempt are warranted.
The Broadview Six prosecutors’ problem began with the charging decision itself. The case grew out of a Sept. 26, 2025, confrontation outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, where protesters surrounded a federal agent’s vehicle. According to Fox News, one grand jury session declined to indict on Oct. 9, 2025, and a third session returned a felony conspiracy indictment on Oct. 23 against six people, including former Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh. The government later dropped every charge, the last of them days before trial in May 2026, The Independent reported at the time, quoting Perry as saying at a closed hearing that “trust has been broken.”
The Justice Department’s latest filing, from the office of Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, asked Perry to identify the legal authority for the hearing and to consider limiting or forgoing it. It argued that the prosecutors faced a bind: “They can testify and risk prosecution, or they can assert their rights under the Fifth Amendment and risk antagonizing the court,” Fox reported. Perry was unpersuaded. “Ultimately, the Government’s professed lack of clarity about the Court’s inherent authority to ask lawyers who have made misstatements to or misled the Court to explain their actions is immaterial,” she wrote, adding that the government does not represent at least three of the four people asked to testify, two of whom have said they are willing. She also rejected the department’s privilege log as “noncompliant.”
The order rests on a court’s inherent power to police the candor of lawyers who appear before it, a power that does not depend on a pending prosecution. That matters beyond Chicago, because the Justice Department’s standing in immigration-related courtrooms is already under strain. A New York judge removed a DOJ lawyer from an ICE warrantless-arrest class action after finding a government letter misdescribed a court order, and federal prosecutors in Western Washington told a court they lack the staff to answer every immigration habeas petition. A sworn hearing in which a sitting U.S. Attorney answers questions about grand jury practice would go further than either episode.
Two questions now hang over Monday. If any prosecutor invokes the Fifth Amendment, Perry would have to decide what weight that carries in a sanctions inquiry. The department could also ask the Seventh Circuit to intervene first, though no such petition has been reported. Whatever Perry finds, the testimony will feed the wider legal fight over protests at immigration facilities, which has already produced a split Ninth Circuit ruling on crowd-control limits in Portland. For prosecutors weighing future charges against protesters, the Broadview record is a reminder that a contested grand jury presentation can come back as a question about the lawyers rather than the defendants.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources: Biden judge rejects DOJ bid to halt probe of prosecutors in botched ICE protest case, Fox News (Nov. 12, 2026); Ill. Judge Sets Chicago DOJ Testimony Despite Bid For Clarity, Law360 (November 2026); Judge lambasts DOJ after feds drop all charges against ICE protesters in Chicago case, The Independent via Yahoo News (May 22, 2026).
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