Chicago, Illinois - President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has dropped all remaining charges against four people who protested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility last year.
The news comes mere days before Kat Abughazaleh, Andre Martin, Michael Rabbitt, and Brian Straw were set to appear in court for a trial scheduled to start Tuesday, May 26.
All four defendants faced misdemeanor charges for allegedly impeding federal law enforcement during protests outside an ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois.
Trump's DOJ had latched onto the cases after the Broadview Facility protests became a centerpiece of the resistance against Washington's aggressive and often violent immigration crackdown in Illinois.
A spokesperson for Chicago US Attorney Andrew Boutros announced on Thursday that his office would be dismissing all charges with prejudice. As a result, they cannot be refiled.
"I am relieved to be exonerated today, but I want to state clearly that fighting these unjust federal charges over the past seven months was never just about me or my codefendants in this case," Straw said in a statement.
Abughazaleh, a journalist who in March lost a Democratic primary for a House seat in Illinois, said in a statement that the entire ordeal had only been necessary because she and the others had protested the Trump administration's "unlawful behavior."
"ICE has beaten and tear-gassed American citizens," she told reporters after the case was dismissed. "We were outside the Broadview processing center, which now functions as a concentration camp – and we were saying that enough is enough."
"The administration does things like this because it thinks that they can silence us, but it's not going to work," she said.