For months, Brian Straw has watched his 6-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son struggle with nightmares. As a parent, Straw was prepared for middle-of-the-night wakeups, for when his kids would come to him worried about monsters under the bed.
He didn’t expect these kinds of nightmares. Ones about whether their dad will come home from court. For those are steeped in reality.
Straw, a local elected official in west suburban Oak Park, is among the four remaining “Broadview Six” defendants. After half a year of litigation in the case, which was initially indicted as a federal conspiracy, Straw is bringing his story to the fore.
“The last six and a half, seven months of my life,” the Oak Park trustee says, “have been hell.”
A jury trial in the case looms next week. The politically charged prosecution is down to misdemeanor counts of impeding an immigration agent after a federal judge recently tossed what was then the highest charge against the defendants, a lone count of felony conspiracy. The allegations stem from one of the many flashpoint protests held outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in west suburban Broadview through the course of the government’s 64-day crackdown across Chicago last fall.
Should the trial proceed as scheduled Tuesday, it would mark an exceedingly rare example of federal misdemeanor charges going to trial at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. The last case of similar nature and stature was nearly a decade ago, when former U.S. Rep Mel Reynolds was convicted on a bench trial of four misdemeanor tax evasion counts.
Part-time garden store worker and singer Joselyn Walsh was the first of the “Broadview Six” to speak out, sharing her story with the Tribune late last year. Federal prosecutors abruptly dropped their charges against Walsh, alongside one-time candidate for Cook County Board Catherine Sharp, in March.
In addition to Straw, remaining defendants include Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, a former Democratic congressional candidate; Andre Martin, who was Abughazaleh’s campaign manager; and 45th Ward Democratic Committeeman Michael Rabbitt.
On Monday, proceedings continued with a pretrial conference, where U.S. District Judge April Perry took up a flurry of outstanding issues, from agreeing to review unredacted grand jury transcripts after repeated requests by defense counsel to deciding what evidence will be admissible during the trial. Through the two-hour hearing, Straw sat behind his attorney in a blue suit jacket. A few times, the pair leaned in to converse quietly as the ins and outs of trial were worked out.
Straw’s wife, Shannon Craig Straw, sat a row behind him, where she watched the discussion intently. At one point, as Perry went back and forth with federal prosecutors about the nature of their arguments, she put her head in her hands.
Earlier this month, though he couldn’t talk specifics on the cusp of trial, Straw recounted and reflected on what drove him to protest and the months since he was charged in an interview with the Tribune.
Through the sit-down, Straw, a litigation lawyer, spoke of campus organizing in college and of working on former President Barack Obama’s first campaign, as well as a goal of working for the U.S. attorney’s office when he first started studying law. He remembered how he was spurred to protest during the first Trump administration and later, watching dozens of migrants come to Oak Park’s doorstep on a snowy Halloween night.
When Operation Midway Blitz descended on Chicago, “of course, he was gonna go protest,” his wife said.
There have been a lot of tears since he was charged in October, Straw says. Some from fear, some from gratitude for the way he’s seen the community rally behind him and his family as they face the federal government.
Asked how he’s feeling headed into the coming weeks, Straw said it’s been strange.
“Congratulations, you all are no longer charged with felonies,” Perry told Straw and his fellow defendants after dismissing the conspiracy count against them weeks ago. But it doesn’t feel like a moment for congratulations, Straw said.
“There’s some relief, but I’m not grateful to the U.S. attorney’s office that I’m not facing a felony charge anymore,” he said. “I’m more sad about where we are.”
Caring for your neighbor
A Washington, D.C., native, Straw said politics were always something that he found himself surrounded by growing up. But it wasn’t until the 2004 presidential election that he made the decision to get more involved.
It’s with that mindset that he started his freshman year at Hope College, a private Christian liberal arts college in Michigan. That’s where he met Shannon. As young students, they both got involved with the campus’ College Dems, where they sought to discuss politics from a religious perspective, exploring how progressive policies and faith can, and for them do, work in tandem. It’s about caring for your neighbor, Straw said.
He finished his undergraduate career in three years so he could work for the 2008 Obama campaign, then remained in the campaign space for a stint before deciding to go into law. In his law school application essay, Straw wrote about wanting to be an assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting white collar crime.
“This has been an interesting experience for me because I’ve always held our U.S. attorney’s offices in such high regard,” he said of his own case.
In 2014, after law school, he and Shannon relocated to the Chicago area, where Shannon was from. For those first few years after the move, Straw kept his focus on starting a family with Shannon and establishing his practice. Then the 2016 election came and went. He remembered going to a protest not long after Inauguration Day to decry a travel ban that Trump had enacted against several mostly Muslim countries.
Straw joined a group of legal volunteers helping refugees enter the country, which later connected him with Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors, a nonprofit that provides free legal assistance to low-income immigrants and their families. He went on to serve on the organization’s board for years.
Seeking public office is something that snuck up on Straw. He’d been working on a volunteer transportation commission for Oak Park back in 2022 when he saw a need for greater attention to street safety by elected officials, he said.
Nearly seven months after Straw was elected a village trustee, the migrant crisis hit Oak Park. For more than a year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had been sending busloads of migrants to Chicago and other immigration-friendly U.S. interior cities.
It was Halloween 2023, Straw remembered, when the new arrivals streamed into his suburb. That night, the weather was cold and blustery as more than 100 migrants, who’d been living outside a police station in the nearby Austin neighborhood had come to Oak Park for warmth and shelter.
“They came to the village seeking refuge,” Straw said. He paused for a long time. “Sorry,” he said, choking back a sob.
Nightmares
Terrifying is the word that comes to mind when Straw thinks about that September morning at the heart of the government’s accusations.
It was his first time going to protest at Broadview’s ICE facility, where, for weeks at that point, people had been amassing to express their outrage over the blitz. Straw said that he’d gone out to the facility, which sits about 10 minutes away from Oak Park, to see firsthand what was happening and bring that perspective back to his community.
Four days after the protest, at a village board meeting, Straw recounted his experience.
“This is not a situation,” he had relayed, “where the truth is somewhere in the middle of what you see published by the federal government and what you hear reported by people who were there on the ground.”
It was around a month later that Straw got a call from the FBI.
Prosecutors have alleged the defendants were part of a group that surrounded an ICE vehicle outside the Broadview facility during a Sept. 26 protest and “banged aggressively” on the vehicle’s side and back windows, hood and doors before they “crowded together in the front and side of the Government Vehicle and pushed against the vehicle to hinder and impede its movement.”
They have further alleged that protesters scratched the vehicle’s body, broke a side mirror and a rear windshield wiper and etched the word “PIG” into the paint — though none of the defendants are accused of specifically causing that damage.
Prosecutors plan to use several clips capturing the incident from different angles at trial as exhibits. The videos, viewed by the Tribune, show a black SUV slowly rolling through a crowd of people as they yell out chants and obscenities. As the car inches forward, footage shows some protesters hitting the hood and windows as they try to block its movement. In two of the videos, Straw appears to be in the frame.
Prosecutors, laying out their description of the footage, said in a court filing that while protesters were chanting “Shame!” Straw “continued to jostle with protesters to get in front” of the agent’s vehicle, then threw his Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee on the windshield.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago denied comment ahead of trial.
The day he heard from the FBI, Straw took his son for a walk. After he explained what was going on, his son told him, ‘“You were doing the right thing,’” Straw recalled.
The couple have always made a point of speaking with their kids about how their values inform engagement, about protest and advocating for their own beliefs. It goes back to their religious background and that fundamental conviction of standing up for their neighbors, Shannon Craig Straw said.
It’s been difficult, though, navigating how to protect their kids through everything.
A few weeks after the indictment was made public, Straw said he received a threatening phone call that prompted him and his family to leave their house for a night. Oak Park police Chief Shatonya Johnson in a statement to the Tribune confirmed that the department investigated a threatening call to a village trustee last year. Authorities later determined the trustee and his family were not in immediate danger.
Since that call, Straw’s son “has had nightmares about whether our house is going to be shot up,” he said.
Before the fall, the couple had solutions to keep the nightmares at bay. For their daughter, they created “monster spray” — a mix of vanilla and water — and for their son, they had a teddy bear-turned-superhero that’d sit on the edge of his bed.
“But then how, as a parent,” Shannon Craig Straw said, “do you figure (it) out when their fears are the same as yours?”
Losing trust in the process
If it goes as planned, the “Broadview Six” trial will perhaps be the most-watched misdemeanor proceeding to ever unfold at Dirksen, where gangsters, fraudsters, bank robbers and crooked politicians typically garner most of the attention. The trial is expected to last only a week or two, including jury selection, which Perry on Monday said will surely be challenging “given all the publicity on the case.”
Generally, trials for a case such as this one are fairly unusual and misdemeanor trials even more so, according to Eric Fish, a criminal law and professional ethics professor at UC Davis in Northern California.
Asked why a trial in a case like the “Broadview Six” prosecution isn’t something seen as often, Fish said, “For your traditional federal districts like the Northern District of Chicago … they tend to think of themselves as focused on more serious crimes.”
Most federal districts are only charging three to four types of crimes, Fish said. The most common include drug trafficking and drug distribution, immigration violations and fraud, as well as firearm offenses, distribution of child pornography and bank robberies.
“They would kind of find it hard to justify taking a misdemeanor case,” Fish said. “There are situations where they do. … (But) I think, usually, federal prosecutors see that as a waste of their resources.”
Other law experts have previously raised concerns about the case, likening the litigation to prosecuting political opponents and arguing — in and of itself — that it conveys intimidation.
With accusations front and center that Trump has used the Justice Department to go after political enemies, Chicago’s top federal prosecutor U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros in an interview with the Tribune and Sun-Times earlier this year was adamant that hasn’t happened in Chicago.
Straw’s attorney, Christopher Parente, in an interview ahead of Monday’s hearing said he thinks the government doesn’t “actually care … how this shakes out.”
“(I think) they intended to cause these individuals reputational and financial harm,” Parente said.
The hope, Parente says, is that the trial ends in an acquittal. But they’re never going to get back those sleepless nights for Straw’s family, he said.
“I’m convinced that there’s going to be a time in this country,” he said, “where people look back … and recognize how shameful our Department of Justice acted.”
Straw says this case represents, in a way, a loss of innocence and a loss of trust in the process for his kids. Shannon Craig Straw said it’s too much to think about the after.
“We have to figure out what living in this new reality looks like,” she said, “even after it’s officially over.”
The Tribune’s Jason Meisner contributed.
