Federal prosecutors quietly dismissed charges this week against a California man who was set to go on trial on Monday for sending hostile text messages to federal agents during the immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
In a court filing on Thursday, prosecutors told a federal judge that they came to realize days before the start of the trial that the government lacked conclusive evidence that the man, James Patrick Lyons, had committed a crime.
The dismissal of the charges against Mr. Lyons, who faced five counts of making interstate threats to injure law enforcement officers, adds to the scores of federal cases that have unraveled in the Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up deportations.
Many cases against people charged with assaulting or impeding the work of federal agents have fallen apart at trial or have been dismissed because of investigative missteps, according to a review by The New York Times.
The case against Mr. Lyons was filed at a particularly tense time in the immigration operation in Minnesota over the past winter.
On Jan. 14, after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a Venezuelan migrant following a high-speed chase in Minneapolis, protesters broke into a couple of vehicles that belonged to F.B.I. agents. Documents found inside, listing the cellphone numbers of several law enforcement officials, were posted on social media.
Mr. Lyons was accused of sending five messages to some of those numbers in which he said that he hoped the agents would “burn in hell.” The messages, which included profanity, said, “We know who you are and where to find you,” according to an indictment.
Mr. Lyons’s lawyer, Peter Wold, said the government had offered his client a misdemeanor plea deal that would have spared him from serving time in prison — an offer he declined. Had he been convicted at trial, Mr. Lyons could have faced more than four years in prison, his lawyer said.
Mr. Wold said prosecutors informed him on Thursday that the F.B.I. agent who oversaw the investigation had classified Mr. Lyons’s threats as “vague” — rather than as credible threats of bodily injury.
“This was their case agent who would be testifying at trial,” Mr. Wold said in an interview.
In a motion asking the court to dismiss the case, prosecutors said new evidence that the government obtained this week “precludes its ability to prove the charges filed in this matter beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Hoang Bui, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, declined to comment on why that conclusion wasn’t reached sooner.
Mr. Wold said his client had become deeply distressed by several of the Trump administration’s policies.
Mr. Lyons has a transgender child who lost access to medical care that had been provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Mr. Wold said. And the partner of another of Mr. Lyons’s children is a U.S. citizen of Mexican ancestry who has lived in fear since immigration enforcement ramped up last year, the lawyer added.
While the messages that Mr. Lyons sent included crude language, they did not convey an outright threat to injure someone, Mr. Wold said, a fact that should have been apparent to investigators at the outset.
“I can’t remember another case getting dismissed on the eve of trial,” he said.
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