Trump’s DOJ charged hundreds with assaulting officers. Many cases were dropped, but the damage was done

Listen July 30 - Christian Garcia admits that he threw a water bottle toward officers guarding a federal building near Los Angeles during an immigration protest last summer.

The plastic bottle was empty, he said, and hit no one but Garcia himself – the wind blew it back at him. Yet Garcia, a 32-year-old amateur photographer, was arrested by agents, jailed for three days and charged with a crime that could have kept him in prison for up to a year. He said he lost both of his jobs, as a security guard and an undercover shopper, after his bosses told him they had been called by investigators.

Then, with no public explanation, prosecutors dropped the case.

The Trump administration has brought criminal charges against at least 851 people accused of attacking or impeding federal officers, only to abandon them at an unusually high rate. A Reuters review of federal court records found that 31% of these cases that have been completed so far have ended in dismissal. That compares to 8% of all federal criminal cases that typically end in dismissal, according to records compiled by the Federal Judicial Center.

Prosecutors fared especially poorly when bringing charges against people detained during immigration protests, dropping about 45% of the 86 such cases that had been completed by the end of May, Reuters found.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said its leadership has made clear that "anyone who assaults or obstructs law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said prosecutors should hold people accountable for such assaults, but “if there are mitigating factors identified in a case, then prosecutors must also act appropriately to inform the court, and in some cases downgrade or drop charges.”

The DOJ's charges have imposed a steep cost on some people, even when the cases are dropped. Reuters interviewed a half dozen people who, despite the abandoned charges, reported lost jobs, legal fees and in some cases a flurry of online threats that arrived after federal officials publicized their arrests.

Garcia said he couldn’t get his jobs back even after prosecutors dismissed his case. He said he also never got back the phone an agent seized.

"It’s like I got no justice whatsoever," Garcia said. "My whole life changed in one day."

The original charging document said Garcia was "observed throwing an object" at officers while others in a crowd threw projectiles "including rocks and water bottles" that struck officers’ shields.

Their accounts show the Trump administration regularly opted to make federal cases out of encounters that prosecutors said historically would not have led to arrests or serious charges.

Among them are a woman who backed her SUV into an agent’s car at low speed; a man who challenged an agent to box but threw no punches; and another who jumped on a Homeland Security agent’s car during a protest. And they famously brought charges against a Washington man who threw a sandwich that bounced off an immigration agent’s body armor.

Other assaults in the cases reviewed by Reuters were serious and would almost certainly have been prosecuted under any administration, including the case of a woman in Minnesota accused of biting off the tip of a federal agent’s finger in January.

But the scale and intensity of the Trump administration’s pursuit of alleged officer assaults breaks from past DOJ practice, as does its lowered bar for bringing such cases to court, according to court records and people familiar with the effort.

The Justice Department instructed prosecutors last year that decisions to turn down such cases had to be explained to Washington, two officials familiar with the instructions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. That pressured prosecutors to take cases that might otherwise have been rejected.

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told immigration officials in Arizona in May that the department would prosecute any assault on an officer "no matter what."

Federal prosecutors almost always win the cases they bring. Most years, about 90% of the people charged with a federal crime are convicted, according to records kept by the Federal Judicial Center.

The Trump administration’s spate of assault charges has been a notable exception, with prosecutors securing convictions in 65% of the 481 cases Reuters examined that had been completed. The vast majority of the cases were dismissed at prosecutors’ request.

The remaining cases among the 851 reviewed by Reuters are still pending.

The high dismissal rate suggests authorities "are moving so fast that they don’t have time to do their job effectively," said Kyle Boynton, a former federal prosecutor and FBI agent with experience in assault investigations.

In most cases, prosecutors provided no reason for dropping charges, other than saying that it was "in the interests of justice."

That was the explanation they gave Lizzie Rose, who was charged in January with backing her car into an SUV carrying immigration agents after following it through Minneapolis. A neighbor captured the incident on video, which shows a low-speed collision.

The Homeland Security Department posted her mugshot on social media with a promise that "we will not be intimidated." Her picture appeared in news reports as well. Enough threats poured into her own feeds that she left her house and sent her two children to live with their father, she said.

"It consumed our lives," she said. "It was every day."

Rose, 42, was put on leave from her job at a Minneapolis nonprofit.

When prosecutors threw out their assault charges against 21-year-old Luci Mazur in Chicago, the judge noted that the agent who charged her "had sworn under oath that the affiant had reviewed video evidence that corroborated" his assertion that Mazur had grabbed his arm and resisted arrest. Body-camera footage however, was a factor in the decision by prosecutors to drop the case, the ju...

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