The Department of Homeland Security lied about the protests against last month’s immigration raids in Los Angeles, and now their cases against protestors are getting tossed out.
A report from The Guardian Monday highlighted the shameful discrepancies between some of the Department of Homeland Security’s claims, and the reality of the unrest in Los Angeles. Inaccurate and misleading testimonies from law enforcement officers have resulted in the dismissal of eight felony cases against protesters, and three cases against people who allegedly interfered with immigration raid arrests.
Just two weeks after they were filed, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the charges against four people “in the interest of justice” due to a litany of errors that were discovered in the officers’ testimony.
Social media footage documenting the arrest of two sisters, Ashley and Joceline Rodriguez, directly contradicted the criminal complaint submitted by DHS that Ashley had pushed an officer. Instead, footage showed that the officer had pushed her. The complaint said that Joceline had “grabbed the arm” of one of the officers detaining her sister, but the video shows she only briefly touched it.
Key witness Eduardo Mejorado, a border patrol agent, admitted that he had misstated the order of events. Mejorado said that three men, Christian Cerna-Camacho, Brayan Ramos-Brito, and Jose Mojica, engaged officers in response to the arrests of the Rodriguez sisters. In fact, the sisters were detained after the three men.
A video presented by defense showed an officer pushing Ramos-Brito, who had allegedly “pushed [an] agent in the chest.” Mojica, who allegedly “used his body to physically shield” Ramos-Brito and then “elbowed” an officer, was taken to the ground with Ramos-Brito. The video did not show Mojica assault the officers.
Cerna-Camacho, who allegedly made threatening remarks against immigration officers, still faces pending charges, but their lawyers have argued that the case must be dismissed because the indictment listed the wrong name.
Of the nine cases alleging that protesters assaulted law enforcement officers and impeded them from doing their jobs, seven of them have already been dismissed by prosecutors. The DOJ has filed lower-level misdemeanors against six of the defendants in six of the dismissed felony cases.
These glaring errors should be setting off alarm bells for careful readers, as DHS officials have taken to vastly overstating the rate of assaults against its officers and using it as justification for militarizing Donald Trump’s deportation scheme. But with a little scrutiny, their claims tend to fall apart. Already, multiple grand juries have refused to indict protesters arrested during the anti-ICE demonstrations, sending Trump’s lead prosecutor shrieking to high heaven.