County Prosecutors Acted as ICE Informants in Illinois

County prosecutors in Illinois have quietly turned the state's sanctuary promise on its head. Rolando Perez Samayoa believed the 2017 TRUST Act would shield him. He fled violence in Mexico, landed in southern Illinois, and cleaned a factory for a living. It didn't work out that way. A DUI arrest in Marion County last October put him in the local justice system, and he showed up for every hearing, court records confirm, but that didn't matter. In late January, assistant state's attorney John Christeson emailed a Homeland Security Investigations agent named Sergio Fulgencio, and the message carried Samayoa's birth date, his upcoming court date, and his address in Centralia. Fulgencio replied within minutes. “Ok, we’ll take care of it, thank you.” Two days later, he asked for police reports. Christeson sent them. So three weeks after that, federal agents grabbed Samayoa outside his home, and they also hauled off his 17-year-old son.

That exchange sits inside a cache of emails reviewed by Injustice Watch, spanning the first 15 months of President Donald Trump’s second term. The records show state’s attorneys offices in one out of every six Illinois counties feeding sensitive case data to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. No warrants. No public disclosure. No legislative oversight. No tracking of how often it happened or who got burned. Some prosecutors volunteered information unsolicited. Others just answered when federal agents came knocking. The correspondence crossed party lines, involving everyone from paralegals to elected state’s attorneys. Defense lawyers rarely knew. Defendants never consented.

The TRUST Act’s Blind Spot

The TRUST Act bars police and sheriffs from helping federal agents deport people without a criminal warrant. But it never squarely answered whether prosecutors fall under that same restriction. That ambiguity carved out a gaping loophole. It's big enough to drive a deportation van through. Since Trump returned to office, his administration has cranked up enforcement, detention, and removal operations, and ICE has shown up at worksites, front yards, and courthouses, so the pressure is now everywhere at once. New York has joined Illinois and a dozen other states in blocking local cops from assisting federal immigration efforts. Yet Illinois, often cited as a national sanctuary model, let its own prosecutors become de facto informants, quietly feeding names and details to federal agents while the public looked the other way. That's a quiet betrayal.

Injustice Watch filed FOIA requests with all 102 Illinois state’s attorney’s offices, then pulled additional records from federal and circuit courts. The combined haul ran more than 5,000 pages. The emails contain photographs, home addresses, and the precise windows when a defendant was due in court or scheduled for release from jail. That timing data is gold for ICE, which wants to make arrests without a warrant. Eleven offices never responded. Some only produced records after Injustice Watch sued them under FOIA. The rest are still tied up in litigation.

The written record only tells part of the story. It's a thin slice. Messages like “Thank you for taking my call” hint at conversations no FOIA request could ever capture, and those fleeting courtesies point to a deeper, undocumented reality. None of this was inevitable. Dozens of Illinois counties faced the same federal pressure and claimed zero contact with ICE, so their denials ring hollow against the backdrop of what other jurisdictions quietly admitted. At least one prosecutor made a point of shutting it out entirely. That's a telling detail. But every act of collaboration was a choice, not a mandate, and the choices had real consequences: people flagged to ICE got detained and deported, splitting families apart. So we can't call it fate.

Who Reached Out First

Christeson didn't stop with Samayoa. Twenty minutes after flagging him, he emailed Fulgencio again, and this time he pointed to a man with a local warrant held on an unrelated charge in Missouri. “I’ve got another potential,” he wrote. Fulgencio said agents already had the man on a civil removal order, a deportation order from an immigration court. He asked whether the county warrant should take priority. “Our warrant will not take priority over removal,” Christeson answered. So Fulgencio replied 34 minutes later: “He’s in ICE Custody awaiting removal.” Neither Christeson nor his boss, Marion County State’s Attorney Tim Hudspeth, answered questions about the exchange. It's a telling silence.

DuPage County, in Chicago’s western suburbs where one in five residents was born abroad, contacted federal immigration agents more than any other prosecutor's office in the state. Staffers answered ICE requests and offered up specific cases for federal agents to chase. Then, in April 2025, a Customs and Border Protection officer at O’Hare International Airport asked an assistant prosecutor for records tied to a voter fraud investigation. That request came as an administrative subpoena issued by DHS, not by a judge. It carries little weight on its own. So if the office refused, DHS would have to go to federal court and try to enforce it, a process that rarely moves quickly. But DuPage State’s Attorney Bob Berlin said his office reviewed the subpoena like any other and produced the records. He defended the broader contact as permitted under the TRUST Act’s criminal investigation carve-out, which allows cooperation with federal agencies in such probes. It's the law, he argued. And that's that.

In central Illinois, Menard County State’s Attorney Gwendolyn Thomas contacted federal agents at least five times. She often asked whether a defendant was “on a deportation list” to assess flight risk, and shared details about the men she was prosecuting, including when one might get out of jail. She also pointed colleagues in neighboring Cass and Mason counties to Homeland Security investigator Kevin Parks. Those prosecutors then wrote to Parks on their own, saying Thomas had shared his contact info. Cass County State’s Attorney Craig Miller, who shared information about three defendants, declined to comment. Mason County’s Zachary Bryant said the info from Homeland Security “was helpful in obtaining appropriate identification for purposes of obtaining a valid criminal history for the defendant,” even though records show Parks shared immigration history, not criminal history. Bryant didn’t respond to questions about that discrepancy.

Kendall County State’s Attorney Eric Weis defended the practice. “It is very common that information is shared between agencies in the criminal justice system, including those in law enforcement,” he said, after his office sent a man’s records to a Detroit ICE office for use in immigration court. In Kane County, staffers asked Customs and Border Protection to identify three people through facial recognition. State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser called that “a standard investigatory technique used throughout all of law enforcement.”

The Ones Who Refused

More than half of Illinois state’s attorneys offices said they had no record of contact with ICE since Trump returned to office. Some chose not to collaborate out of internal practice; others did it out of commitment to community trust, and that distinction matters because it shapes how local law enforcement interacts with federal agents every single day. Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart spent months hardening his office against immigration enforcement. He circulated the Illinois attorney general’s guidance on the TRUST Act to police chiefs and told the county’s public defender to report any violations. He said he not only enforced the law, he “happen[ed] to agree with it such that I hope it is widely followed in letter and spirit.” But it's a quiet resistance, not a loud one. And that's exactly how he wants it.

He wrote to state lawmakers in October, warning that when people are afraid to come to court, for any reason, we can't make our communities safe, we can't find the truth, and we can't achieve justice. Fear blocks everything. Rinehart then issued a written policy barring ICE officials from private areas of his office without a judge-signed warrant, a firm boundary set in black and white. And in southern Illinois, Jackson County treated federal agent questions like any other FOIA request, answering with redactions under state public records law, no special treatment granted.

But the divide among prosecutors is stark. Berlin said his office is bound by the TRUST Act, yet it contacted federal officials more than any other. Rinehart said his office isn’t a law enforcement agency under the act, yet it shut ICE out completely. Neither office tracks its contact with ICE. Police departments and sheriff’s offices must file annual TRUST Act compliance reports. State’s attorneys face no such requirement.

A Crisis of Trust

Antonio Gutierrez cofounded Organized Communities Against Deportations and helped push for the TRUST Act. Residents wanted “to trust in local police, in local prosecutors, in the criminal justice system, to be fully separated from immigration and deportation enforcement,” he said. But the records from this investigation prove that trust was never warranted. That's the whole story. Spencer Reynolds, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a former DHS lawyer, warned that because deportation is an easier path than prosecution, some local officials might be tempted to use it to “clear their docket,” and that move, he said, “risks undermining the rights people have in the criminal proceeding context.” Once ICE takes a defendant, the criminal case and its protections fall away. It's that simple.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul sidestepped the central question. He didn't answer it. “Applying the TRUST Act in practice requires state and local enforcement to navigate complex interactions in circumstances that are not always clear-cut,” he said, without saying whether prosecutors are bound by the law he enforces. Governor JB Pritzker didn't respond to questions about whether the TRUST Act binds prosecutors or whether the state should track their ICE contacts. Silence. In June 2025, he flew to Washington to defend Illinois’ sanctuary stance before a hostile House committee, and in December, he signed a law in Little Village barring civil immigration arrests within 1,000 feet of a courthouse, saying the idea that the Trump administration would keep people from attending court “boggles the mind.”

The courthouse law targeted the agent on the sidewalk, not the prosecutor inside. That's an important difference. Nearly all defense attorneys whose clients appear in the records said they had no idea prosecutors were sharing case information with federal agents, a revelation that undermines the very premise of local oversight. University of Kentucky assistant law professor Matthew Boaz called the collaboration unprecedented. “I cannot recall a single instance in my past practice where an individual within the state’s attorney’s office shared information with ICE,” he said. Still, he added, “the sentiment of the TRUST Act;separating state/local criminal law enforcement from federal civil immigration enforcement;would seem to include any actor within the criminal legal system.” So the gap is obvious. And it's a dangerous one.

For Samayoa, the legal arguments are beside the point. Whatever idea he had about Illinois being a sanctuary ended in February, when ICE agents descended on him in his own front yard. His son was taken too. The emails that made it possible sat in a prosecutor’s outbox, a paper trail of how a sanctuary state’s promise dissolved one case at a time.