Federal prosecutors moved Wednesday to drop charges against a comedy club manager accused of shutting a car door on a federal immigration agent’s leg in the Lakeview neighborhood, the latest in a string of dismissals in high-profile cases that resulted from the Trump administration’s so-called Operation Midway Blitz.
Nathan Griffin, 24, was charged in late October with assaulting, impeding or interfering with a federal officer during one of many skirmishes between federal agents and American citizens that punctuated the Trump administration’s wave of illegal immigration enforcement in and around Chicago.
Most federal agents have moved on from Chicago, while criminal cases against U.S. citizens that arose from their time here have continued to move through the legal system. But many of those charges have disintegrated only weeks after being filed.
Griffin’s family declined to comment on the dismissal and his attorney didn’t immediately respond
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agent Paul Delgado, whom Griffin had been accused of injuring, testified in a preliminary examination last month that when he and a group of other agents had just conducted an arrest at Belmont Avenue and Broadway in the Lakeview neighborhood when they mistakenly thought one of the other agents had dropped his body camera and returned to the scene in two separate cars.
Delgado testified that he saw a crowd of people forming around the other vehicle and tried to get out of the car when Griffin allegedly slammed the door back on his leg. Agents then tackled Griffin and took him into custody, leading to a videotaped car ride in which Griffin, apparently well aware he was being filmed, unleashed a steady stream of invective about his opinion of the “blitz” and the agents carrying it out. One of the agents, several minutes into the tirade, told Griffin to “relax.”
“Relax?,” Griffin asked in response. “You guys are abducting people off the streets! Relax?”
“No comment,” said one of the agents in the back seat.
“Oh, no comment,” Griffin repeated. “No comment.”
The agent riding in the front passenger seat radioed that the car was on Sheridan Road, mispronouncing “Sheridan” as “Shirden.” The agent driving the car said they were at Sheridan and Belmont before Griffin interjected again.
“We’re on the corner of (expletive) and (expletive),” he said. “Oh, and also there is a (expletive) sad (expletive) jerk off sitting right beside me, holding my arm. The only human contact he’s ever gonna feel for the rest of his (expletive) life.”
The motion to scrap the case against Griffin without prejudice follows prosecutors’ move to drop charges against Marimar Martinez, the 30-year-old woman who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Brighton Park who claimed Martinez “rammed” a federal vehicle with her own car in an Oct. 4 standoff.
In a nine-page opinion regarding another one of those cases, against a U.S veteran charged with assault, U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes wrote he could not “help but note just how unusual and possibly unprecedented it is” for Chicago’s venerable U.S. attorney’s office to bring charges “so hastily” that, once more facts came out, they were unable to obtain an indictment in the grand jury or were forced to dismiss the case as not provable.
Only a handful of people are still facing charges for their actions in opposition to the blitz. Among them is the congressional candidate and digital creator Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, who has been accused of conspiracy along with several other local political figures for their actions outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in a west suburb. All of the “Broadview Six” have pleaded not guilty.