Crime & Law

Judge Won’t Toss Charges Against Border Patrol Agent Accused of Sex Assaults Despite ‘Broadview Six’ Grand Jury Ties

A federal judge has refused to toss out charges against a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent whom federal prosecutors allege operated in Chicago as a “serial rapist” after it was revealed those charges came from the same grand jury in the botched “Broadview Six” case.

Just days before trial, U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso on Wednesday denied a request from Luis Uribe to dismiss the case against him amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury that indicted him.

Already those allegations led to dismissals in the high-profile Broadview protester case, as well as a handful of other cases stemming from the same grand jury proceedings.

While Alonso in his order noted that “prosecutorial misconduct tainted the grand jury proceedings” in the Broadview case, he found that that case was “entirely unrelated to Uribe.”

While it was the same grand jury, the prosecutor accused of committing the misconduct, Sheri Mecklenburg, was not assigned to Uribe’s case and never presented anything to the grand jury about it, Alonso wrote in a four-page order Wednesday.

“And the crimes at issue in this case — as charged, that Uribe sexually assaulted certain women under color of law — are unrelated to the Broadview Six protests against the detention of immigrants at ICE’s Broadview detention facility,” the judge wrote.

Uribe, of Pingree Grove, Illinois, was arrested in December and was charged with 10 counts of deprivation of civil rights under color of law and one count of brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.

In seeking to have Uribe detained pending trial, prosecutors alleged that he turned his position as a Border Patrol officer into a “license to commit or attempt to commit gunpoint sexual assaults and robberies” against sex workers.

According to prosecutors, on multiple separate occasions throughout 2022, Uribe forced his way into a hotel room where the victims were staying, and robbed and/or attempted to sexually assault the victims. All of the victims were of Chinese descent, prosecutors said, and each alleged incident occurred in the Chicago suburbs.

At one point, a sex worker was instructed by her boss to meet with Uribe at a neutral location in order to photograph him so the image could be distributed to other workers and Uribe could be bribed into stopping his attacks, prosecutors alleged.

Uribe has pleaded not guilty.

The Broadview Six case was a black eye for Chicago’s U.S. Attorney’s Office after unsealed transcripts showed prosecutors allegedly excused skeptical grand jurors, held improper communications with grand jurors outside of the court proceedings and “vouched” about the strength of their case.

Uribe’s attorneys last month argued in a motion that their client’s charges should be tossed out because Mecklenburg’s alleged conduct “compromised the Independence” of the grand jury.

“Here, there was no structural defect with the grand jury and Uribe is unable to establish a reasonable factual foundation to support a finding of potential prejudice,” Alonso wrote. “The Court has conducted an in-camera review of relevant recordings and transcripts from the grand jury presentation in Uribe’s case, and the Court found no evidence of inappropriate conduct related to Uribe’s case.”

Uribe’s trial is set to begin next week.

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