WASHINGTON — A left-wing influencer and Democratic congressional candidate has been charged with impeding federal immigration enforcement in Chicago.
Kat Abughazaleh, formerly employed by the liberal watchdog Media Matters, was indicted along with four others for having “conspired … to prevent by force, intimidation, and threat” a federal law enforcement officer from carrying out official duties in a manner seeking “to injure him in his person or property.”
She and her co-conspirators “physically hindered and impeded” an unidentified officer who was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators” during a protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, Ill., on Sept. 26.
Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin, Catherine Sharp, Brian Straw, and Joselyn Walsh were also named in the 11-page indictment, which was filed Oct. 23 in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
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Abughazaleh is running to replace a vacancy left in Illinois’ Ninth Congressional District left by retiring Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky.
In an X video post, she railed against the indictment as “political prosecution” that is seeking to “criminalize protest” and asked for viewers “help,” though she made no reference to donations for any legal defense fund.
“ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls and tear-gassed hundreds of protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors and terrorizing us cannot be our new normal,” she said.
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