These “are not ordinary times at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse” in Chicago’s Loop.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes made that clear Thursday, as he closed the book on the last of five now-dismissed prosecutions tied to September protests outside a federal immigration holding facility in the western suburbs.

Fuentes used a nine-page opinion not only to dismiss, with prejudice, a misdemeanor charge against Dana Briggs, but to highlight how each of those five cases, all tied to Operation Midway Blitz, “were highly unusual in this district for several reasons.”

“The court cannot help but note just how unusual and possibly unprecedented it is for the U.S. attorney’s office in this district to charge so hastily that it either could not obtain the indictment in the

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