Illinois promised to protect immigrants. Local officials helped deport them anyway.

This story was published in partnership with The Intercept, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism.

Minutes after Riverton police officer Brad Herzog ran 31-year-old Daniel Torrez Perez’s name through a law enforcement database one night in April 2025, his phone rang. It was the FBI.

“Every bell and whistle went off,” said Jack Griffin, the agent on the other end of the line.

Herzog had pulled Torrez over for going 15 miles above the speed limit on a rural two-lane highway just northeast of Springfield. Herzog ran Torrez’s name and date of birth on his squad car laptop to confirm his identity. His search tripped a federal alert, and within minutes Griffin was on the line.

The exchange was captured on body-worn camera footage obtained by Injustice Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Torrez had an administrative Immigration and Customs Enforcement warrant, meaning ICE was seeking to arrest him for deportation.

Griffin was with the FBI, not ICE. His call that night reflects the bureau’s increased role in immigration enforcement in the second Trump administration.

Under Illinois law, Herzog couldn’t hold Torrez for federal agents.

In 2017, Illinois passed the TRUST Act on the principle that immigration is governed by federal civil law and local police have no business enforcing it. It was a sentiment bipartisan enough that a Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, signed it.

The law limits Illinois law enforcement agencies’ ability to assist immigration agents: They can’t transfer people to ICE custody without a criminal warrant signed by a judge, allow ICE agents to call or visit someone in a local jail, or “assist in any capacity with an immigration agents’ enforcement operations.”

Griffin knew that the immigration warrant was off-limits to Herzog.

“I know you can’t act on that,” Griffin told him. “I know this puts you in a weird bind.”

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Then the FBI agent offered a way around it: Torrez also had an outstanding state warrant on a DUI charge, he noted. Herzog couldn’t arrest Torrez on the immigration warrant, but he could arrest him on the state one. The charge had nothing to do with immigration, but the outcome Griffin wanted was the same. 

“You can take him under the state warrant, and that would hold him overnight,” Griffin said. “I don’t wanna miss my opportunity here.”

Herzog agreed to arrest Torrez on the state warrant and book him into the local jail, ensuring he wouldn’t be released that night.

“I appreciate that, thank you very much,” Griffin said, adding that he’d look for Torrez the next morning.

“Sounds good,” Herzog replied.

In the first 15 months following President Donald Trump’s return to office, local officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois fed information to federal immigration agents, sometimes in apparent violation of state law. In over a third of Illinois counties, at least one police department, sheriff’s office, or state’s attorney’s office collaborated with federal agents. At least 150 people in Illinois were swept into the immigration system this way, in a state that presented itself as a shield against it.

Injustice Watch’s investigation draws on more than 30 hours of body-worn camera footage, 394 records requests, and more than 100 court filings, as well as conversations with more than 20 people who were flagged, detained, or deported, and more than 50 of their relatives. Many would talk only on the condition of anonymity, afraid of retaliation, or ashamed of what had happened to them.

Illinois’ TRUST Act is one of the strongest laws in the nation meant to protect immigrants and has often been cited as a national model. More than a dozen states, including New York and California, have similar laws.

But the records unearthed in Illinois show a pattern of continued collaboration with federal immigration agencies that raise questions about the limits of such laws: Sheriffs honoring ICE detainers the law forbids them to honor. Police departments emailing federal agents the home addresses, employers, and daily whereabouts of people stopped for speeding. A local detective asking ICE to run the immigration status of an armed-robbery victim. Officers with a local badge and an ICE email address, sharing immigration data that’s supposed to be off-limits to them. Jails releasing people directly to waiting ICE agents, at the federal government’s direction.

The TRUST Act came with exceptions: Police can act on a federal criminal warrant, volunteer someone’s immigration status, or release an arrest report on request. And it left shared databases untouched — simply running a name through a law enforcement database is enough to trip a federal alert, the way it did the night Torrez was pulled over.

Some agencies refused to turn over records sought through FOIA requests; Injustice Watch is suing more than a dozen local, state, and federal agencies to pry them loose. The true count of people swept up under local-federal collaborations is almost certainly higher, in part because of missing records.

When taken one by one, collaborations between local officials and federal immigration agents may appear as small, isolated incidents. But at the end of that paper trail are at least 150 people uprooted from their lives in Illinois and funneled into the deportation system, in a state whose leaders had promised over and over again that it wouldn’t happen here.

Collaboration by keystroke

The most common kind of collaboration was also the simplest: a local official pulling up a record and emailing it to an ICE agent. Roughly 85 such exchanges appear across the records reviewed by Injustice Watch.

The TRUST Act specifically prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from “providing information in response to any immigration agent’s inquiry or request for information regarding any individual in the agency’s custody” unless required to by a judge’s warrant or federal law.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an Ohio State University law professor who studies how criminal and immigration systems intersect, describes this type of collaboration as one built on “the kinds of professional relationships that commonly develop among law enforcement officers, especially in small communities where people know each other.”

Most are “entirely aboveboard,” he said, but they can sometimes “clash with directives, like what we see in the TRUST Act.”

In Tinley Park, a southwest Chicago suburb, communications with ICE agents flowed freely.

It started, the department’s emails show, at an early 2025 law enforcement meeting in Hinsdale, where Tinley Park detectives met Homeland Security Investigations special agent Daniel Mejdrech. Word moved through the department that Mejdrech, as one officer later put it in an email, “may be interested in cases with individuals with warrants that are not citizens or on a visa.”

In March 2025, Detective Justin Rzeszutko emailed Mejdrech a suspect’s passport photo and asked for “recent USA entry/exit photos.” The agent wrote back that the man had used aliases, had been deported from Canada, and sat on “a watchlist,” and offered to help locate him if the detective sent along addresses or associates. When Rzeszutko later secured an arrest warrant, Mejdrech volunteered muscle: “If you want manpower when you grab him, say the word and I can bring some folks.”

In April 2025, an ICE agent asked Tinley Park officer Jason L’Amas for “lead data” on a man the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer sent back the man’s driver’s license number, home address, phone number, and employer, and flagged where to find him: “His crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently.”

Months later, in a case first reported by the Chicago Tribune, L’Amas emailed an ICE deportation officer a report about a different man; days later, the ICE officer wrote back: “Just a heads up we took this guy into custody today.” Injustice Watch identified the man and confirmed he was deported to Honduras.

Ed Yohnka, a director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said these two exchanges may have violated the TRUST Act. Individual officers using informal connections with federal agents to share information about people they’d encountered without a warrant “is not supposed to be something that state or local police inquire about,” he said.

The first email exchange, he said, was a sign of something broader: a culture or belief in the Tinley Park Police Department that assisting with immigration enforcement was appropriate behavior, despite state law.

Tinley Park Police Chief Thomas Tilton didn’t respond to questions about his officers’ interactions with federal immigration officials. Neither did Village Manager Pat Carr.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has extraordinary power to investigate TRUST Act violations: He can hold hearings, examine officials under oath, and issue subpoenas for records. But he rarely exercises that authority.

“The Attorney General’s office uses a compliance-oriented approach in carrying out its TRUST Act enforcement responsibilities,” Raoul said in a statement. “This approach includes providing trainings, technical assistance and nonregulatory guidance to law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois.” He declined to answer questions about Tinley Park or to specify how many times his office has taken enforcement action under the statute.

The ACLU of Illinois, meanwhile, has long pushed the Attorney General’s Office for increased monitoring of the law.

“One of the things that we often see in law enforcement generally is that individual officers too often believe that they can apply their own judgment to what should be permissible as opposed to what is required” under the state and federal law, said Yohnka. “And then there isn’t the kind of vigorous accountability for those actions.”

The officers with two badges

In Hoffman Estates, a detective found a federal contact in his own department. Tom LaPak has been a police officer there since 2001 and, since 2004, a Homeland Security Investigations task force officer assigned to its financial investigations group. He carries a village badge and uses an ICE email address.

That’s because task force officers like LaPak are local cops the state cross-deputizes to work federal criminal cases.

The TRUST Act carves out room for this: It allows local officers to work with agencies like Homeland Security Investigations on criminal matters “in order to ensure public safety.”

The law doesn’t allow federal agents to use that partnership to enforce immigration law. For example, the law draws a line between tracking down a scam ring and checking a victim’s immigration status.

Records reviewed by Injustice Watch show some officers appeared to have crossed that line anyway.

On the morning of Sept. 4, 2025, Marc Shaw, a Hoffman Estates detective, emailed LaPak about an armed robbery — but not to ask about the robber.

Shaw wrote that “some red flags have been raised with the victim”: The case might be staged, he suspected, to support a U visa claim.

A U visa offers a path to citizenship for certain victims who report crimes and cooperate with police. Both that protection and Illinois’ own TRUST Act rest on the same idea: encouraging immigrants to come forward to law enforcement without triggering their own deportation.

But Shaw’s email treated a victim’s possible path to protection as a reason to suspect him of fraud.

“I was wondering if it’s possible to check his citizenship status to see if I’m tracking this correctly or the issues that have been arising are coincidental,” Shaw wrote. 

LaPak wrote back the same afternoon. “I’m still waiting on confirmation, but it appears he is a Visa overstay,” he wrote. “He should have left the U.S. in 2016.”

“Ok thanks that’s definitely good to know,” Shaw replied. “I appreciate it!”

Reached by phone, Hoffman Estates Police Chief Kasia Cawley said her department didn’t violate the TRUST Act. She also defended her detective, who she said had recently participated in a training on spotting U visa fraud and had a hunch that something was off because there were no witnesses to the crime, she said. 

The man was never charged — or told his status had been checked.

Cooperation with task force officers ran the other way, too, with the federal government reaching through them to enlist local officers in immigration operations.

On Jan. 13, 2025, a week before Trump’s inauguration, a Homeland Security Investigations Chicago supervisor emailed dozens of agents and task force officers about “several operations in furtherance of the new administration’s objectives.” A joint operation with Enforcement and Removal Operations — ICE’s deportation arm — was set to run Jan. 21 through 27. It would focus, the email said, on “non-citizens who pose the highest public safety risk,” along with employer inspections of area businesses.

“It is important that as many personnel as possible — including our task force officers — participate,” the supervisor wrote.

The distribution list included officers at police departments in Urbana, Peoria, Decatur, and across central Illinois — local cops looped into the planning of a federal deportation operation.

Two police chiefs reached by Injustice Watch distanced themselves from the operations. Urbana Police Chief Larry Boone said his task force officers joined a Zoom briefing but didn’t participate in removal operations. Peoria’s chief, Bradley Dixon, said his officers didn’t either. Decatur chief Brad Allen did not respond to questions.

Collaboration by default

When Riverton officer Herzog ran Daniel Torrez’s name the night of that traffic stop, he didn’t contact the FBI; the database did.

Fingerprints taken at booking are automatically routed through a network of databases that flows from the Illinois State Police to the FBI. From there, they reach the Department of Homeland Security, where they’re checked against immigration databases. An arrest for almost anything — a DUI, shoplifting — can surface a decades-old immigration record and tell ICE exactly where to find the person.

Injustice Watch reviewed more than 40 federal court affidavits in which a fingerprint taken at a local booking and matched against federal records helped build an immigration case.

Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a former Department of Homeland Security attorney, said the automatic sharing of data “is a fundamental threat to protective laws for residents and visitors in any given state.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the FBI said agents “work within the law and policy to support our partners in immigration enforcement and protect the U.S. from a variety of threats.”

In interviews and emails, local police chiefs described the booking process as one beyond their control. Fingerprints are automatically sent to the state and federal systems, and local agencies can’t opt out of the system or dictate what Illinois State Police or federal agents do with the data. As O’Fallon chief Kirk Brueggeman put it, the department has “no say in how a federal agent — operating under a different set of laws — uses those resources that we do not control.”

Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly didn’t respond to questions about how his agency transmits data to federal agencies.

Kelly was handpicked by Gov. JB Pritzker, who consistently made promises to protect all residents across Illinois. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2024, Pritzker told cable news, “I’m going to do everything I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.” At a conference this past April, he recalled how he’s been standing up to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies since the president’s first term.

Pritzker didn’t respond to questions about how state police share immigration-related information.

The automatic transmission of data is so pervasive that it even touches the few departments that, in a review of public records, turn ICE away when it comes knocking.  

In February, Zenobia Jones, an administrative staffer for the Atlanta, Georgia, immigration court prosecutor, asked Aurora police records staff for documents related to an individual — but didn’t get far.

“The Illinois TRUST Act generally prohibits local law enforcement from sharing information with federal immigration agencies with limited exceptions,” wrote Aurora police records manager Elizabeth Robles. Jones never wrote back. Two months later, an ICE deportation officer named Gregory Ortiz made a similar request from the same department. Robles handed Ortiz the same response. Ortiz never wrote back, either.

But for all the resistance the Aurora Police Department put up against ICE requests, it couldn’t stop the automatic sharing of fingerprints gathered in the course of routine arrests — three of which, court records show, were used as part of federal immigration cases.

A roundabout way to honor ICE detainers

The U.S. Marshals Service takes custody of people accused in federal criminal cases, as well as some of those serving shorter sentences. Because it operates no jails of its own, the agency contracts with local jails for bed space, including facilities in Illinois.

The TRUST Act bars Illinois jails from similar contracts with ICE, and explicitly bars them from honoring ICE detainers — civil requests to hold a person past their scheduled release. It also prohibits jails from handing anyone over to ICE.

Some jails do it anyway, at the Marshals’ direction.

In October 2025, a man who’d pleaded guilty to drug charges was in Marshals custody at the Marion County Jail in southern Illinois. Marshals administrator Lauren Patterson emailed an ICE agent asking if the agency could take him from the jail, then told the jail ICE would collect him on Oct. 12.

That day, a sergeant confirmed to Patterson and several ICE agents that the man “was picked up by ICE approximately 0715 this morning.”

Two months later, the Marshals Service instructed the jail to release another man into ICE custody, and once again, the jail obliged.

Marion County Sheriff Kevin Cripps, who runs the jail, insists his office did nothing wrong. 

“We at no time had contact with ICE,” he said. His jail houses people for the Marshals Service, and when he releases them he does so only while “acting under their authority.”

Documents reviewed by Injustice Watch suggest a similar pattern across other Illinois jails. In effect, the Trump administration, not Illinois law, decides whom a state jail releases to immigration agents.

In a statement, the Marshals placed responsibility on the sheriffs. 

“Should state law prohibit the jails from honoring detainers,” a spokesperson said, the agency “would anticipate that the jails follow their state law.”

Asked whether his office would do anything to address the practice, Attorney General Raoul declined to answer.

State laws bind local officials but can’t bind the federal government. As professor García Hernández explained, “the Marshals Service or DHS, they can come knocking as often as they like” — it’s up to local officials to abide by state law. But, he added, so many loopholes are baked into laws like the TRUST Act that it can “allow the exceptions to swallow the rule.”

In some counties, sheriffs aren’t taking direction from the Marshals Service and are instead honoring ICE detainers directly — a direct violation of the TRUST Act. Records indicate that at least four counties have done so since Trump returned to office. 

In late June 2025, Hancock County State’s Attorney Bobi James emailed ICE agent Ron Shevela about an upcoming plea deal that would release a man her office was prosecuting. But there was a snag: The agent would be out of town until July 1, and the prosecutor worried nothing would keep the man jailed past his release.

“I could send you a detainer before then, if you’d like,” wrote the agent. 

“That would probably be necessary,” James replied. 

Two days later, the ICE detainer landed in the jail administrator’s inbox.

Hancock Sheriff Travis Duffy didn’t respond to questions about the detainer; neither did prosecutor James.

Xanat Sobrevilla, who co-founded the advocacy group Organized Communities Against Deportations, said that for the families she works with, the trust communities have tried to build with local agencies is eroding.

“It’s hard to continue to believe in something that continues to hurt you,” she said. 

After Riverton officer Herzog pulled Torrez over just outside Springfield, Torrez spent that night in the Sangamon County Jail, exactly as the FBI agent on the phone had wanted. Hours later, he was in ICE’s grip.

In an affidavit, ICE deportation officer J.R. Hentz said Torrez was taken “into custody inside the booking area of the Sangamon County, Illinois jail” the day after he was arrested.

Sangamon County Sheriff Paula Crouch didn’t respond to a request for comment; neither did her husband, Riverton Police Chief Bob Crouch.

Injustice Watch confirmed Torrez was deported to Guatemala late last year.

Click to explore some of the documents from this investigation.

This article first appeared on Injustice Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.