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Federal prosecutors are used to winning cases.
In fiscal year 2024, when a federal criminal case reached a jury verdict, prosecutors won nearly 90% of the time, according to federal court data.
But in cases where the Department of Justice has attempted to convict protesters for felony assault on federal agents, the math looks very different. The government secured exactly zero felony convictions across 12 cases that went before a jury last year, according to reporting last week from The Associated Press. Those cases all ended in acquittals, mistrials or dismissals.
The analysis looked at the outcome of 102 arrests for felony assault on an officer made during anti-ICE protests last year in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon — all cities where President Donald Trump tried to deploy the National Guard during sustained protest activity.
The government didn’t fare much better in the cases that never reached a jury. The AP found that just 10 people among the 102 arrested pleaded guilty to felony assault, while 41% of the cases were dismissed and 34% were pleaded down to misdemeanors. Plea bargaining is the norm in federal courts, and prosecutors routinely agree to lesser charges. But the overall results for DOJ prosecutors are still unusually poor. In 2024, 82% of federal defendants charged with assault were ultimately convicted, either at trial or through a guilty plea. Among the protest cases the AP looked at, fewer than half were. Three additional cases are scheduled for later this year.
Grand juries have historically been an even easier audience for federal prosecutors. Unlike with trial juries, which assess a defendant’s guilt or innocence, grand jurors consider whether the government has enough evidence to formally charge someone with a crime. From 2007 to 2016, the last decade for which the federal government published relevant data, grand juries nationwide declined to indict an average of just 15 people a year, out of tens of thousands of annual cases.
But in Chicago alone, federal grand juries declined to indict at least three defendants arrested over alleged conduct during anti-ICE protests in the fall of 2025. Such rejections had been “virtually unheard of” before the immigration operation, according to Judge Gabriel Fuentes, a magistrate judge in the Northern District of Illinois.
Newly unsealed records offer a rare glimpse of just how skeptical some of those grand jurors were. The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this month that jurors repeatedly pressed prosecutors for evidence they hadn’t presented, including additional witnesses, cellphone and surveillance video, and medical records. In one of the cases the grand jury ultimately rejected, a prosecutor eventually told the court that the government could not “realistically obtain” everything the panel wanted.
It’s not clear why jurors have been reluctant to go along with prosecutors in these protest cases. In Chicago, the U.S. attorney in charge of the prosecutions suggested to Bloomberg Law that some of the grand jury defeats were “clear instances of straight jury nullification.” This occurs when jurors conclude that prosecutors have met the appropriate legal threshold for an indictment or conviction, but vote against them anyway, because they reject the premise of the underlying law or the government’s decision to invoke it.
It’s also possible that DOJ lawyers are bringing cases they might previously have declined because of directives from Trump administration officials. A Reuters investigation this summer found that a new department policy requires prosecutors to explain any decision to turn down a case to higher-ups in Washington. “That pressured prosecutors to take cases that might otherwise have been rejected,” Reuters reported, citing two sources familiar with the instructions.
Jurors aren’t the only people in federal courthouses who appear to be giving the government less benefit of the doubt. In Chicago, Judge Fuentes — who noted that grand jury rejections were nearly unheard of — cited findings that the Department of Homeland Security had submitted unreliable sworn declarations and that its “agents’ ‘candor’ was ‘open to question.’”
That kind of judicial skepticism has extended well beyond the prosecution of protesters. In July, ProPublica identified more than 40 cases since Trump returned to office in which federal judges explicitly questioned the “presumption of regularity” — the longstanding principle that courts generally assume government officials have followed the rules and acted in good faith.
Among them was Mary McElroy, a Trump-appointed district court judge in Rhode Island who wrote in May that the presumption that the DOJ could be taken at its word “no longer holds.” The remark came in a case where the department wanted to seize the medical records of minors who received gender-affirming care at Rhode Island Hospital.
The department has rejected these criticisms. At his confirmation hearing in July, Attorney General Todd Blanche was shown a poster compiling phrases judges had used to criticize the department, including “bad faith,” “losing credibility” and “disingenuous.” Blanche dismissed them as cherry-picked and “not reflective” of the department’s broad body of work.
But there’s no denying that the department, despite the breadth of its work, is a substantially different institution from two years ago. The department employed 21% fewer lawyers in March than it did at the end of 2024, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.
The administration has portrayed some of that turnover as a feature, not a bug. In February, for example, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, publicly encouraged departures by career lawyers she portrayed as unwilling to carry out the administration’s agenda. Months later, the DOJ began offering a $25,000 signing bonus to lure recruits to that same office.
Even some prospective hires who are politically sympathetic to the administration are weighing the reputational consequences. In a New York Times interview, Matthew Duray, a conservative Republican studying at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, said his peers wonder, “Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career wise — having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?
“Or will that hurt?”
