Only Criminals Don’t Want To Be Gassed By The Government

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, my former employer, has filed a criminal complaint against Alejandro Orellana, a local immigration activist in Los Angeles. They’ve charged him for distributing face masks to protestors. They specify that the masks are supposed to protect protestors from “chemical splashes and flying debris,” a goal they claim is self-evidently criminal.

The complaint is shameful, a propagandistic paean to authoritarianism. A quarter-century after I left that office it stings that the office brought the complaint, that a magistrate judge I respect signed it, and that a former colleague is prosecuting it. I am repulsed.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has charged Orellana with conspiracy to commit civil disorder and aiding and abetting civil disorder in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371 (which prohibits conspiracy) and Title 18, United States Code, Section 231(a)(3) (which prohibits obstructing and impeding law enforcement officers incident as part of a civil disorder, defined as “any public disturbance involving acts of violence by assemblages of three or more persons, which causes an immediate danger of or results in damage or injury to the property or person of another individual”). You can read the complaint here:

In the federal system, law enforcement gets a criminal complaint by providing an affidavit supplying sworn evidence supporting probable cause to a United States Magistrate judge. Here, FBI Special Agent Rene Persaud did so by telephone on June 12, 2025. The rules permit that, though it’s more typically done on a weekend or when the affiant is in a remote place; it’s not clear why this affidavit was presented by telephone in Los Angeles on a Thursday.

Special Agent Persaud’s affidavit is in many ways a classic work of federal law enforcement braggadocio, demanding that the reader accept broad generalizations and law enforcement truisms about crime, suspected criminals, and law enforcement operations. Here, because the subject matter is the June 6, 2025 demonstrations against ICE operations in Los Angeles, the hubris is particularly stark. Let’s begin with the vagueness of the allegations about violence from protestors:

Affidavits in support of federal complaints and search warrants can include hearsay, but they are supposed to include attribution. That means they’re supposed to contain sufficient information to let the Magistrate Judge evaluate the ultimate source of the hearsay and its reliability. For instance, “I read a report from Officer Smith, who said he interviewed Witness Jones, who said he saw Defendant strike the victim” is attributed. For Special Agent Persaud’s affidavit, we have only the boilerplate omnibus attribution at the start:

So for all we know Agent Persaud got that description of the protests from President Trump or Fox News.

But that is not the most offensive part of the affidavit. Agent Persaud lays out the government’s logic for why someone distributing face shields must be part of a conspiracy to promote civil unrest. First, anyone present to receive a shield after the cops have declared an unlawful assembly is a criminal:

Agent Persaud describes the evidence that Mr. Arellana distributed face shields called “the Uvex Bionic Shield” at the protest. He specified that the people receiving them were bad, not good:

Next, Agent Persaud explained that the shields help “weaken the effects of less-than-lethal law enforcement devices,” and concludes that wearing a face shield suggests criminal intent:

Troubled by someone thwarting their ability to gas protestors effectively, federal law enforcement served search warrants on Orellana’s home and truck on June 11, 2025. They found a notebook that with anti-police rhetoric:

They found a slingshot, which Agent Persaud explained he has heard “historically during other periods of civil unrest” have been used against police. They found spray paint, plastic goggles, and “multiple fabric and N95 face masks,” and offered a picture of what they found:

That’s it. Based on that, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged Alejandro Orellana with two federal felonies, and will doubtless indict him on the charges any day now. They also demanded that he be detained pre-trial on the grounds that no combination of conditions could protect the community from the danger of someone distributing face masks or assure that he would appear for trial:

The government later withdrew that demand and Magistrate Judge Charles Eick — to his credit — released Orellana on a $5,000 signature bond signed by a relative — meaning nobody had to post any money, just promise to pay if he doesn’t appear.

The affidavit, and the prosecution, are worthy of our contempt. They rest on the premise that the government’s conclusory descriptions of protests as violent are reliable. That’s manifestly not true; the government is complicit in widespread lies about the protests, including by the cynical and dishonest Attorney General of the United States. The prosecution and affidavit rely on the government’s laughable assertion that you can believe its characterization of which protestors are legitimate and which are criminals even as they eagerly implement the policy of a president who openly thirsted to shoot protestors to show strength. The prosecution and affidavit rely on the government’s assertion that anyone wanting to protect themselves from law enforcement’s “less lethal” crowd control measures is a criminal seeking to do violence. This is manifestly and offensively a lie; less-lethal measures are routinely abused to target and hurt protestors and journalists. In their swollen hypocrisy, they call masks self-evidently criminal as they send masked and unidentified ICE agents to sweep up men, women, and children in the street and disappear them.

The agents, prosecutors, and judges who participate in this are making a choice. The choice is to lie about what is happening around them and what they are doing. The choice is to prop up the administration’s narrative: the demonization of immigrants, the criminalization of protests, the normalization of government violence, the delegitimization of dissent. The choice is to present what the administration claims as self-evidently true and lawful even as the administration openly defies the law and gleefully lies to courts. They should be judged on that choice, by each of us, and by history. We should stop treating them as legitimate. We should stop believing them.

I struggled to identify why this affidavit seemed familiar, how it reminded me of something. It struck me that this was most reminiscent of my Catholic upbringing. The familiar forms and stock phrases of the affidavit are the liturgy, the unquestioned affidavit and resulting judicial imprimatur the call and response of the priest and congregation. It relies upon unquestionable authority. Only a cad, a heretic, an outsider, would interrupt or question it.

Be a heretic about what the government is telling you. They’re lying.