This story was produced in partnership with Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago targeted on the court docket system.
Rolando Perez Samayoa had come to the US in 2023 searching for security. Fleeing violence in Mexico, he’d first deliberate to make a life in Alabama however had been informed that Illinois would shield immigrants like him. “There’s some form of legislation there,” he stated. “It’s supposed to be a sanctuary.”
He was referring to the state’s 2017 TRUST Act, which was meant to hold native legislation enforcement out of federal deportation efforts. Samayoa made his approach to southern Illinois and located work cleansing a manufacturing facility. After a DUI arrest in Marion County final October, Samayoa stated, he attended his hearings—a truth confirmed by court docket information.
In late January, John Christeson, an assistant state’s lawyer in the workplace prosecuting the case, emailed an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, about Samayoa. The message included his date of start, an upcoming court docket date, and the place he lived: Centralia, Illinois.
“Okay, we’ll handle it, thanks,” the federal agent, Sergio Fulgencio, wrote again minutes later. Two days later, he wished to know extra: “Do you’ve got any studies on this man?”
Christeson despatched him the police report and associated tickets. Three weeks later, federal brokers apprehended Samayoa exterior his residence. They hauled off his 17-year-old son, too.
The alternate is amongst dozens of emails reviewed by Injustice Watch that reveal a sample of consequential collaboration between county prosecutors and federal immigration companies throughout Illinois throughout the first 15 months of President Donald Trump’s second time period.
State’s attorneys places of work in 1 out of each 6 Illinois counties acted as precious property of federal immigration enforcement, sharing delicate private information about the individuals they have been prosecuting with out felony warrants, public disclosure, or legislative oversight and with no accounting of how typically it occurred or who was affected.
Generally, prosecutors volunteered information on their very own. Different occasions, they merely answered when Division of Homeland Safety brokers got here calling. The correspondence crossed occasion strains and included everybody from paralegals to elected state’s attorneys. The collaboration usually occurred with out the data of defendants or their attorneys.
The TRUST Act bars police and different companies from serving to federal brokers deport individuals absent a federal felony warrant. However the legislation doesn’t squarely reply whether or not prosecutors and their employees are sure by those self same restrictions.
Since Trump took workplace for the second time, his administration has ramped up immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation, and ICE has visibly displayed its enforcement at worksites, entrance yards, and courthouses. In response, states together with New York have joined Illinois and greater than a dozen others in barring native police and sheriffs from serving to with federal immigration enforcement. However the scale of prosecutor collaboration in Illinois—which is one in all the largest sanctuary states and is typically cited as a nationwide mannequin—raises questions on the limitations of state legal guidelines to shield immigrants.
Injustice Watch filed Freedom of Data Act requests with all 102 Illinois state’s lawyer’s places of work and drew on information from federal and circuit courts. Collectively, these inner emails and case information ran greater than 5,000 pages. The paperwork reveal that prosecutors shared far more than simply names. Their emails include pictures. House addresses. The date and time a defendant was due in court docket or set to depart jail—the actual window for ICE to make an arrest.
Eleven places of work didn’t reply; some produced information solely after Injustice Watch sued them below FOIA. The remaining stay in litigation.
And the written report could also be solely a part of the story. Messages with phrases like “Thanks for taking my name” level to conversations no information requests might comply with.
None of it was inevitable. Dozens of Illinois county prosecutors, confronted with the similar federal stress, claimed that they had no report of contact with ICE, and no less than one made a degree of shutting it out—suggesting each act of collaboration was a selection.
And the decisions had penalties: Folks flagged to ICE have been detained and deported, tearing households aside.
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