Federal prosecutors moved on Monday to dismiss their case against David Huerta, a Los Angeles labor leader whose arrest during an immigration raid last year helped spark a wave of demonstrations against the Trump administration’s crackdown in the nation’s second-largest city.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said in a statement that the case would be officially dismissed by the end of next month, as long as Mr. Huerta continued to follow the terms of his pretrial release agreement and not violate any laws. He had been scheduled to go to trial in August.
Mr. Huerta, the California president of the Service Employees International Union, was arrested in June 2025 after federal agents said he had impeded their work by trying to block a car and had encouraged others to join him as officers conducted an immigration raid on a clothing wholesaler.
Other protesters captured video of the arrest, which was violent enough to send Mr. Huerta to the hospital with a head injury. The next day, President Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, saying they were needed to help address protests and protect federal agents enforcing the law.
Mr. Huerta was initially charged with conspiring to impede an officer, a felony offense that carries a sentence of up to six years in federal prison. He was released on a $50,000 bond, after about three days in federal custody. In October, prosecutors downgraded the charge to a misdemeanor.
Mr. Huerta, who has not admitted any wrongdoing, said on Monday that he was vindicated by the move to dismiss the charge.
“This means the government is finally admitting what we knew from Day 1 and what was obvious to anyone who saw the videos: The charge against me was baseless, meant to intimidate anyone who dares to speak out, organize, or demand justice,” he said in a statement. “There was never a real case, only an attempt to punish and silence me for exercising my constitutional rights.”
The U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement that the dismissal of the case did not mean that Mr. Huerta was wrongly arrested in the first place.
“The Department of Justice does not arrest people for peacefully protesting,” the statement said. “For the last 13 months, he has been compliant with the terms of his bond and has not engaged in the same obstructive behavior that led to his arrest and criminal charges being filed against him.”
When Mr. Huerta was arrested, immigrant rights advocates and local leaders — including Mayor Karen Bass, who visited Mr. Huerta in the hospital — said that they were troubled by the aggressive response to what they said was peaceful and routine protest.
Even before the Trump administration’s crackdown, they said, Mr. Huerta and other advocates would often rush to the scene of immigrant detentions to help connect those who were being detained with legal resources or other help.
A little more than a year later, The New York Times reported that the federal government had either abandoned or lost hundreds of criminal cases against people who protested the administration’s immigration enforcement.
Legal experts said that the pattern of filing charges that later unraveled — either because juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges or prosecutors abandoned them — suggested that the administration’s use of the law in these cases was less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal protection to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.
Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.
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