Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh is calling her federal indictment a case of political prosecution after allegedly impeding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Chicago. The 26-year-old activist and former Media Matters employee faces charges of conspiring to obstruct a federal officer during a protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, on September 26.
According to a federal indictment filed October 23 in the Northern District of Illinois, Abughazaleh and four co-defendants “conspired … to prevent by force, intimidation, and threat” an ICE officer from carrying out official duties. Prosecutors said the group “physically hindered and impeded” the officer, forcing him to “drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators.”
Video footage from the demonstration showed Abughazaleh and others forming a human chain in front of an ICE vehicle while chanting, “Down down with deportation, up up with liberation.” Courts have ruled that while peaceful protest is constitutionally protected, blocking government operations or endangering public safety can result in criminal charges.
Abughazaleh, who is running to represent Illinois’ Ninth Congressional District, denied wrongdoing in a video statement on X, calling the indictment “political prosecution” and a “gross attempt to silence dissent.” She claimed, “ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls and tear-gassed hundreds of protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors and terrorizing us cannot be our new normal.”
She also accused federal authorities of trying to “scare us into silence” and said the charges showed that “they are scared” and “on the wrong side of history.”
