President Donald Trump’s ultra-loyalist top prosecutor in Los Angeles has failed to convict a single anti-ICE protester at trial, despite his office charging more than 100 people.
Trump appointee Bill Essayli has led an aggressive campaign since June against anti-immigration enforcement protesters, many of whom were arrested and charged after immigration agents first shoved them, hit them, or even struck them with a car.
The charges have included allegedly assaulting federal agents, and interfering with immigration enforcement.
Since then, prosecutors have not won any of the five assault on a federal officer cases taken to trial, the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday.
Twenty-eight people charged have taken plea deals, while other cases have been dismissed.
The Los Angeles cases follow a nationwide trend of prosecutors struggling to convict anti-immigration protesters, including a man who threw a Subway sandwich at immigration agents in Washington, D.C., last year.
On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury acquitted a man who was caught on video punching an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in the face during an operation last summer.
The defendant, Luis Hipolito, did not deny hitting the officer, but said he thought the masked agents—who did not identify themselves and were wearing generic vests with the word “police” on them—were bounty hunters trying to kidnap a woman.
He said he acted instinctively and in self-defense after he was pepper sprayed and elbowed by the agents.
The woman he was trying to protect, a U.S. citizen named Andrea Velez who is 4 feet 11 inches tall, was also charged with assault, but prosecutors dismissed the case after viewing body camera footage of the encounter.
On Thursday, a judge threw out another case against two protesters accused of assaulting federal agents after prosecutors failed to turn over use-of-force reports to the defendants.
The reports revealed that an agent had repeatedly put his knee on one of the defendant’s backs, and identified federal officers previously unknown to the defense team.
The judge ruled that the failure to turn over the evidence was a “Brady violation” that violated the defendants’ due process. Under procedures known as “Brady,” prosecutors have to hand the defense any material which would tend to show the defendant’s innocence, or cast doubt on the integrity of the prosecution’s evidence.
“You would think that, at some point, they might start to realize that history and the public are not on their side, that the will of the people is not on their side,” Hipolito’s pro-bono defense attorney, Ricardo A. Nicol told the Times. “But they’re so determined to get convictions on these cases, they don’t stop.”
Reached for comment by the Times, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment on the cases. The Daily Beast has also reached out.
The Trump administration has claimed the aggressive prosecutions are necessary because assaults against federal agents have gone up by 1,000 percent amid the president’s mass deportation campaign.
In June, disgraced former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino told immigration agents to “arrest as many people that touch you as you want to.”
“Everybody f---ing gets it if they touch you,” he told agents in Los Angeles. “This is our f---ing city.”
A review of court records in Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland found that assaults on all federal officers—not just immigration agents—were up by just 26 percent, from 129 to 163, the Times reported in December.
In just 16 percent of the cases, or 26 out 163, the officer was seriously injured or needed medical attention.
