Justice Department Moves to Drop Its Case Against SEIU Leader David Huerta, 13 Months After Announcing It

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles filed a motion on July 27, 2026 to dismiss its criminal case against David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California, who was arrested in June 2025 while protesting outside a Los Angeles business where federal agents were serving an immigration-related search warrant. Prosecutors initially charged Huerta with felony obstruction and reduced it to a misdemeanor in October 2025. The office said that under an agreement with Huerta, if he continues to comply with his pretrial release terms it expects the case to be fully dismissed by the end of August 2026, and said the department "doesn't arrest people for peacefully protesting."

Huerta's arrest became a rallying point during the 2025 Los Angeles protests that preceded the National Guard deployment there, and the case was announced publicly on social media at the time. Its collapse is one of a series of setbacks for federal prosecutions of people accused of impeding officers during immigration enforcement operations.

Huerta said in a statement that "there was never a real case, only an attempt to punish and silence me for exercising my constitutional rights." His lawyers, Abbe Lowell and Marilyn Bednarski, said the filing showed critics "will not be silenced." Bill Essayli, who as acting U.S. attorney brought the charge, was disqualified from several cases in October 2025 by a judge who found he had stayed in the acting role longer than the law allows.