A Minnesota judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton offered no prison time to an anti-deportation activist who was convicted of repeatedly assaulting federal officers, including by later punching an arresting agent in the head, during an uprising against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Clinton-nominated Judge John Tunheim let 28-year-old Isabel Lopez go free at her sentencing hearing on Tuesday, ordering that she only has to pay a small $25 fine as penalty for the federal assault charge she pleaded guilty to.
“You have suffered the sentence already in many respects,” Tunheim told Lopez. “This is over once you pay the $25.”
Her defense attorneys had argued in a sentencing plea, requesting at most a probationary period of three months, that Lopez has been “highly traumatized by being arrested, jailed for a couple of days, and having to endure a felony prosecution for a year.” Tunheim on Tuesday granted Lopez’s request that he respect the non-incarceration plea deal she struck and allowed her to avoid probation altogether.
Lopez, who has been out of jail on supervised release since June 2025, was charged with three felony counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers over a violent Minneapolis riot she participated in last year, plus one felony count of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder. However, ahead of sentencing, she pleaded down to a single Class A misdemeanor of the assault charge.
Misdemeanor assault on or impediment of a federal officer is punishable by a maximum sentence of one year in federal prison, fines of up to $100,000, and five years’ probation.
Prosecutors, though they did not push for Lopez to serve any prison time, asked Tunheim to at least sentence her to a year of probation. “Federal law enforcement must be able to do their jobs without fear that citizens will come off the street and assault them for simply engaging in a lawful search warrant,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kline said at sentencing.
According to the criminal complaint, Lopez was part of a mob of anti-ICE agitators who disrupted a drug bust on June 3, 2025, mistakenly believing it was an immigration raid intended to catch illegal immigrants around the Minneapolis area.
Agents with the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, IRS, and Department of Homeland Security were actually executing search warrants in a multiagency narcotics investigation, which involved money laundering, human trafficking, and a transnational criminal organization.
At one of the sites being searched, Lopez was captured on a police body camera interfering with federal investigators on the scene, striking a SWAT agent with a closed fist, kicking him while fellow protesters tried to restrain her, and hurling a softball at other responding officers working to secure the perimeter. Authorities said Lopez punched an FBI agent in the head days later when officers attempted to arrest her.
Reporters in the courtroom on Tuesday observed “a defiant Lopez” thanking dozens of her supporters who appeared at the sentencing hearing. The crowd reportedly erupted in cheers and applause after Tunheim decided against handing her a prison or even a probationary sentence.
Tunheim said he took into account that the assaulted agents were not left with physical injuries but mentioned that some protesters were. “I do consider this to be serious. I don’t think there was any serious impact of it,” Tunheim said. “There were community members injured that day. I know that.”
In the courtroom, Kline argued, “Miss Lopez seems to be taking this with lightheartedness.”
“Life is good,” Lopez said after sentencing, adding that she was “honestly really surprised” about the lenient sentence. “It feels like a win, you know.”
“In the same way they kept saying this is a serious case and I did some type of violence, at the end of the day, I didn’t kill anybody,” Lopez told reporters.
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The downgraded case marked Minnesota’s first federal conviction of an activist set out to obstruct the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations.
Tunheim has issued several rulings this year related to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. In January, he ordered DHS to stop detaining refugee claimants in Minnesota as part of the agency’s Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening program and to release those in detention. In February, Tunheim ruled against DHS’s petition to dissolve the temporary restraining order blocking the program’s enforcement.