CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors made a surprise announcement in court Wednesday that they are dismissing the main conspiracy charges in the politically charged “Broadview Six” case against immigration protesters and will proceed instead with misdemeanor counts.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan revealed the move at a status hearing before U.S. District Judge April Perry, who had been scheduled to take up a number of thorny issues ahead of the May 26 trial.

Instead, Hogan said they were moving to dismiss the main count in the indictment and are filing a superseding criminal information on misdemeanor counts for the remaining four defendants in the case.

The development in one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Operation Midway Blitz vastly changes the scope and consequences for the defendants and could lead to the trial being scuttled entirely should they decide to cut a deal.

It also came as a complete surprise to attorneys for the defendants, who late on Tuesday had filed a nearly 40-page motion over pretrial issues that are now largely moot.

After the hearing, attorney Christopher Parente, who represents defendant Brian Straw, said the move demonstrated that “this case never should have been brought” and that the government was “giving up” trying to prove it at trial.

“We’ll take the win for right now, but we’re still very angry that they even charged this,” Parente said in the lobby of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.

Parente also noted that by bringing a felony case, the U.S. attorney’s office has caused massive collateral damage, not only to the defendants but also to other people who decided not to go to protests because they were worried about being indicted on a felony conspiracy charge, which he described for reporters as “bull—-.”

The dismissal of the conspiracy charge came on the same day prosecutors had been ordered to bring unreadacted grand jury transcripts to the judge, who was weighing a motion to dismiss based on First Amendment grounds. Records filed by prosecutors showed it took three separate sessions for them to inform the grand jurors on the law before they returned an indictment.

“What did they say to the grand jurors that took them three separate sessions to explain the law on something like this” Parente asked. “Those are the questions that we still have…we’re going to keep fighting.”

The four remaining defendants in the case are: Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, who recenlty lost her bid for the 9th Congressional District seat; Andre Martin, originally of Providence, Rhode Island, who was Abughazaleh’s deputy campaign manager; 45th Ward Democratic Committeeman Michael Rabbitt; and Straw, an Oak Park trustee.

Last month, Perry granted a request from the U.S. attorney’s office to dismiss charges against Catherine Sharp, a onetime candidate for Cook County Board, and Joselyn Walsh, a part-time garden store worker and singer.

The 11-page indictment, prosecutors the defendant were part of a group that surrounded an ICE vehicle outside the Broadview facility during a Sept. 26 protest and “banged aggressively” on the vehicle’s side and back windows, hood and doors before they “crowded together in the front and side of the Government Vehicle and pushed against the vehicle to hinder and impede its movement.”

They further alleged that the protesters scratched the vehicle’s body, broke a side mirror and a rear windshield wiper and etched the word “PIG” into the paint — though no one listed in the indictment is accused of specifically causing that damage.

The conspiracy count carried a maximum sentence of six years in federal prison, while the misemeanor counts of impeding a federal officer are each punishable by up to one year in federal prison.

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