Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants in Illinois

Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants in Illinois

Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants in Illinois helped flag a man for deportation within minutes of his DUI arrest. Rolando Perez Samayoa fled violence in Mexico in 2023, hoping Illinois would protect him. He'd heard about the state's 2017 TRUST Act. “There’s some kind of law there,” he said. “It’s supposed to be a sanctuary.”

Samayoa found work cleaning a factory in southern Illinois. But after a DUI arrest in Marion County last October, he attended every hearing, according to court records, showing up without fail each time the gavel called his name. Then, in late January, assistant state's attorney John Christeson emailed a Homeland Security Investigations agent about Samayoa. It's all there in black and white. That message carried his birth date, an upcoming court date, and his Centralia address, a trifecta of details that pinned him down like a moth to a board. So the record speaks for itself.

“Ok, we'll take care of it, thank you,” federal agent Sergio Fulgencio replied minutes later. Two days after that. Three weeks later, federal agents grabbed Samayoa outside his home. They also hauled off his 17-year-old son.

A Pattern Across 17 Counties

That exchange sits among dozens of emails reviewed by Injustice Watch. The records span the first 15 months of President Donald Trump's second term. State's attorneys offices in one out of every six Illinois counties shared sensitive personal data with federal immigration agencies. No criminal warrants. No public disclosure. No legislative oversight.

Sometimes prosecutors volunteered information on their own. But other times, they simply answered when Department of Homeland Security agents came calling, and the correspondence crossed party lines, pulling in everyone from paralegals to elected state's attorneys. Defendants and their lawyers rarely knew it was happening. It's a quiet secret.

The TRUST Act bars police and other agencies from helping federal agents deport people without a federal criminal warrant. But the law doesn't squarely answer whether prosecutors are bound by those same restrictions. That gap has real consequences.

What Prosecutors Actually Shared

The emails contain far more than names. Photographs. Home addresses. The exact date and time a defendant was due in court or set to leave jail. That's the precise window for ICE to make an arrest. Injustice Watch filed Freedom of Information Act requests with all 102 Illinois state's attorney's offices. The resulting emails and case files ran more than 5,000 pages.

Eleven offices didn't respond at all. Some produced records only after Injustice Watch sued them under FOIA. The rest remain in litigation. And the written record may only tell part of the story. Messages with phrases like “Thank you for taking my call” point to conversations no records request could follow.

None of it was inevitable. Dozens of Illinois county prosecutors claimed they had no record of contact with ICE, and at least one made a point of shutting it out entirely, so every collaboration required a deliberate decision. But the choices tore families apart. They didn't have to.

“When people are afraid to come to court, for any reason, we cannot make our communities safe, we cannot find the truth, and we cannot achieve justice.” - Lake County State's Attorney Eric Rinehart

The Willing and the Reluctant

Marion County's Christeson didn't stop with Samayoa. Twenty minutes after flagging him, he emailed Fulgencio again. “I've got another potential,” he wrote, flagging a man with a local warrant arrested on an unrelated charge in Missouri. Fulgencio replied that agents were already tracking the man on a civil removal order, and that meant the local warrant wouldn't take precedence, so Christeson answered directly. “Our warrant will not take priority over removal.” Then, thirty-four minutes later, the update landed. He's in ICE custody awaiting removal.

Christeson didn't respond to questions. Neither did his boss, Marion County State's Attorney Tim Hudspeth.

The Legal Stakes

Criminal cases offer protections immigration proceedings don't. Prosecutors must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Defendants get appointed attorneys if they can't afford one. Removal proceedings are civil. There's no right to a lawyer, and the government can establish deportability on “clear and convincing evidence,” a lower standard.

Spencer Reynolds, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a former DHS lawyer, said some local officials might use deportation to “clear their docket.” That move “risks undermining the rights people have in the criminal proceeding context,” he warned. But once a defendant is turned over to ICE, the criminal case and its protections fall away. It's gone.

DuPage County, nestled in Chicago's western suburbs, contacted federal immigration agents more than any other prosecutor's office in the entire state. One in five residents there was born abroad. That's a striking fact. In April 2025, a Customs and Border Protection officer at O'Hare asked for records tied to a voter fraud investigation, and the request came as an administrative subpoena issued by DHS, not a judge, which meant it lacked the usual judicial review. So DuPage State's Attorney Bob Berlin said his office reviewed it like any other subpoena. It's a simple claim, but it carries weight.

Gwendolyn Thomas, Menard County's State's Attorney, contacted federal agents at least five times, often asking whether a defendant was “on a deportation list” to assess flight risk. She shared details about the men she was prosecuting, including when one might be released from jail. She pointed colleagues in neighboring Cass and Mason counties to Homeland Security Investigator Kevin Parks. So those prosecutors then wrote to Parks on their own. It's a simple chain. But Thomas's queries didn't stop there,she also weighed in on flight risk and release timing, and that's not new information, just the facts as they stand.

But Some Prosecutors Said No

More than half of Illinois state's attorneys offices said they had no record of contact with ICE since Trump returned to office. Lake County's Eric Rinehart went further. He circulated the Illinois attorney general's guidance on the TRUST Act to police chiefs, and he told the county's public defender to report any TRUST Act violations, and then he issued a written policy barring ICE officials from private areas of his office without a judge-signed warrant. That's a bold move. But it's the kind of clarity the law demands.

Rinehart said his office doesn't arrest or detain people, so it isn't a law enforcement agency under the act. He declines to collaborate regardless. Berlin said his office is bound by the TRUST Act, yet he contacted federal officials more than anyone else, a fact that highlights how the two offices took opposite stances on the law and, just as clearly, opposite sides of the collaboration divide. But they're not the same. One won't touch the feds. The other can't stop calling them.

Jackson County treated federal agent questions like any other FOIA request. They answered with redactions under state public records law.

A Sanctuary State's Broken Promise

Illinois has made repeated promises about how it treats immigrants. But actions speak louder than words. Then-governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican, signed the TRUST Act with bipartisan support at a packed restaurant in Little Village, the Chicago neighborhood that is central to the city's Mexican community and holds deep cultural significance for generations of families who have built their lives there. In 2021, Governor JB Pritzker called Illinois “the most welcoming state in the United States.” That's a bold claim. And it's one that still hasn't been fully tested.

December brought a new law from Pritzker, one that bars civil immigration arrests within 1,000 feet of a courthouse. It's a simple shield for justice. But the Trump administration keeping people from attending court, he said, “boggles the mind.” That's a strange fight to pick. Yet the courthouse law stops the agent on the sidewalk, not the prosecutor inside, and that's the real limit we can't ignore.

Nearly all defense attorneys whose clients appear in the records said they had no idea prosecutors were sharing case information. Legal scholars 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,” said University of Kentucky assistant law professor Matthew Boaz.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul didn't resolve the question. “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 in a statement. Pritzker didn't respond to questions about whether the TRUST Act binds prosecutors or whether Illinois has kept its promises.

For Samayoa, the question of whom the law binds is beside the point. Whatever idea he had about Illinois being a sanctuary ended in February, when ICE agents descended on him outside his home. His 17-year-old son was taken too.