Prosecutors charge 15 over Minneapolis ICE protests

What happened

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota on Tuesday announced charges against 15 people for “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said the defendants were part of two groups aligned with antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist activists targeted under an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year.

Who said what

The 15 people are accused of “coordinating Signal chats and rapid-response networks to track federal immigration officers,” said MPR News, but Rosen “turned aside specific questions connected to the alleged conspiracy.” They “quite deliberately got together and planned violence, used violence,” he told reporters. “Whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm is not the measure” of a “serious federal crime.”

The charges come at a “fraught moment for Minnesota federal prosecutors, who have had trouble sustaining many criminal cases” they filed against anti-ICE protesters, The New York Times said. At least a third have been dismissed “for a variety of reasons,” said The Minnesota Star Tribune.

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What next?

The indictment is “pretty thin,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said to The Washington Post. “The evidence will prove it all out,” Rosen told reporters.