This story was reported and produced by Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago that investigates issues of equity and justice in the court system. Sign up here to get their weekly newsletter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Minutes after Riverton<\/span> police officer Brad Herzog ran 31-year-old Daniel Torrez Perez\u2019s name through a law enforcement database one night in April 2025, his phone rang. It was the FBI.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery bell and whistle went off,\u201d said Jack Griffin, the agent on the other end of the line.<\/p>\n Herzog had pulled Torrez over for going 15 miles above the speed limit on a rural two-lane highway just northeast of Springfield, Illinois. Herzog ran Torrez\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The exchange was captured on body-worn camera footage obtained by Injustice Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request.<\/p>\n Torrez had an administrative Immigration and Customs Enforcement warrant, meaning ICE was seeking to arrest him for deportation.<\/p>\n Griffin was with the FBI, not ICE. His call that night reflects the bureau\u2019s increased role in immigration enforcement<\/a> in the second Trump administration.<\/p>\n Under state law, Herzog couldn\u2019t hold Torrez for federal agents.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The law limits Illinois law enforcement agencies\u2019 ability to assist immigration agents: They can\u2019t 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 \u201cassist in any capacity with an immigration agents\u2019 enforcement operations.\u201d<\/p>\n Griffin knew that the immigration warrant was off-limits to Herzog.<\/p>\n \u201cI know you can\u2019t act on that,\u201d Griffin told him. \u201cI know this puts you in a weird bind.\u201d<\/p>\n Then the FBI agent offered a way around it: Torrez also had an outstanding state warrant on a DUI charge, he noted. Herzog couldn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou can take him under the state warrant, and that would hold him overnight,\u201d Griffin said. \u201cI don\u2019t wanna miss my opportunity here.\u201d<\/p>\n Herzog agreed to arrest Torrez on the state warrant and book him into the local jail, ensuring he wouldn\u2019t be released that night.<\/p>\n \u201cI appreciate that, thank you very much,\u201d Griffin said, adding that he\u2019d look for Torrez the next morning.<\/p>\n \u201cSounds good,\u201d Herzog replied.<\/p>\n In the first 15 months following President Donald Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s office, or state\u2019s attorney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Injustice Watch\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Illinois\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s supposed to be off-limits to them. Jails releasing people directly to waiting ICE agents, at the federal government\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n The TRUST Act came with exceptions: Police can act on a federal criminal warrant, volunteer someone\u2019s immigration status, or release an arrest report on request. And it left shared databases untouched \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> is almost certainly higher, in part because of missing records.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t happen here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The TRUST Act specifically prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from \u201cproviding information in response to any immigration agent\u2019s inquiry or request for information regarding any individual in the agency\u2019s custody\u201d unless required to by a judge\u2019s warrant or federal law.<\/p>\n C\u00e9sar Cuauht\u00e9moc Garc\u00eda Hern\u00e1ndez, an Ohio State University law professor who studies how criminal and immigration systems intersect, describes this type of collaboration as one built on \u201cthe kinds of professional relationships that commonly develop among law enforcement officers, especially in small communities where people know each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Most are \u201centirely aboveboard,\u201d he said, but they can sometimes \u201cclash with directives, like what we see in the TRUST Act.\u201d<\/p>\n In Tinley Park, a southwest Chicago suburb, communications with ICE agents flowed freely.<\/p>\n It started, the department\u2019s emails show, at an early 2025 law enforcement meeting in Hinsdale, where Tinley Park detectives met Homeland Security Investigations<\/a> special agent Daniel Mejdrech. Word moved through the department that Mejdrech, as one officer later put it in an email<\/a>, \u201cmay be interested in cases with individuals with warrants that are not citizens or on a visa.\u201d<\/p>\n In March 2025, Detective Justin Rzeszutko emailed Mejdrech a suspect\u2019s passport photo<\/a> and asked for \u201crecent USA entry\/exit photos.\u201d The agent wrote back that the man had used aliases, had been deported from Canada, and sat on \u201ca watchlist,\u201d and offered to help locate him if the detective sent along addresses or associates. When Rzeszutko later secured an arrest warrant, Mejdrech volunteered muscle: \u201cIf you want manpower when you grab him, say the word and I can bring some folks.\u201d<\/p>\n In April 2025, an ICE agent asked<\/a> Tinley Park officer Jason L\u2019Amas for \u201clead data\u201d on a man the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer sent back the man\u2019s driver\u2019s license number, home address, phone number, and employer, and flagged where to find him: \u201cHis crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently.\u201d<\/p>\n Months later, in a case first reported<\/a> by the Chicago Tribune, L\u2019Amas emailed an ICE deportation officer<\/a> a report about a different man; days later, the ICE officer wrote back: \u201cJust a heads up we took this guy into custody today.\u201d Injustice Watch identified the man and confirmed he was deported to Honduras.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d encountered without a warrant \u201cis not supposed to be something that state or local police inquire about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Tinley Park Police Chief Thomas Tilton didn\u2019t respond to questions about his officers\u2019 interactions with federal immigration officials. Neither did Village Manager Pat Carr.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Attorney General\u2019s office uses a compliance-oriented approach in carrying out its TRUST Act enforcement responsibilities,\u201d Raoul said in a statement. \u201cThis approach includes providing trainings, technical assistance and nonregulatory guidance to law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois.\u201d He declined to answer questions about Tinley Park or to specify how many times his office has taken enforcement action under the statute.<\/p>\n The ACLU of Illinois, meanwhile, has long pushed the attorney general\u2019s office for increased monitoring of the law.<\/p>\n \u201cOne 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\u201d under the state and federal law, said Yohnka. \u201cAnd then there isn\u2019t the kind of vigorous accountability for those actions.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because task force officers like LaPak are local cops the state cross-deputizes to work federal criminal cases.<\/p>\n The TRUST Act carves out room for this: It allows local officers to work with agencies like Homeland Security Investigations on criminal matters \u201cin order to ensure public safety.\u201d<\/p>\n The law doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s immigration status.<\/p>\n Records reviewed by Injustice Watch show some officers appeared to have crossed that line anyway.<\/p>\n On the morning of September 4, 2025, Marc Shaw, a Hoffman Estates detective, emailed LaPak about an armed robbery<\/a> \u2014 but not to ask about the robber.<\/p>\n Shaw wrote that \u201csome red flags have been raised with the victim.\u201d The case might be staged, he suspected, to support a U visa claim.<\/p>\n A U visa offers a path to citizenship<\/a> for certain victims who report crimes and cooperate with police. Both that protection and Illinois\u2019s own TRUST Act rest on the same idea: encouraging immigrants to come forward to law enforcement agencies without triggering their own deportation.<\/p>\n But Shaw\u2019s email treated a victim\u2019s possible path to protection as a reason to suspect him of fraud.<\/p>\n \u201cI was wondering if it\u2019s possible to check his citizenship status to see if I\u2019m tracking this correctly or the issues that have been arising are coincidental,\u201d Shaw wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n LaPak wrote back the same afternoon. \u201cI\u2019m still waiting on confirmation, but it appears he is a Visa overstay,\u201d he wrote. \u201cHe should have left the U.S. in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOk thanks that\u2019s definitely good to know,\u201d Shaw replied. \u201cI appreciate it!\u201d<\/p>\n Reached by phone, Hoffman Estates Police Chief Kasia Cawley said her department didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The man was never charged \u2014 or told his status had been checked.<\/p>\n Cooperation with task force officers ran the other way, too, with the federal government reaching through them to enlist local officers in immigration operations.<\/p>\n On January 13, 2025, a week before Trump\u2019s inauguration, a Homeland Security Investigations Chicago supervisor emailed dozens of agents and task force officers<\/a> about \u201cseveral operations in furtherance of the new administration\u2019s objectives.\u201d A joint operation with Enforcement and Removal Operations \u2014 ICE\u2019s deportation arm \u2014 was set to run January 21 through 27. It would focus, the email said, on \u201cnon-citizens who pose the highest public safety risk,\u201d along with employer inspections of area businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is important that as many personnel as possible \u2014 including our task force officers \u2014 participate,\u201d the supervisor wrote.<\/p>\n The distribution list included officers at police departments in Urbana, Peoria, Decatur, and across central Illinois \u2014 local cops looped into the planning of a federal deportation operation.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t participate in removal operations. Peoria\u2019s chief, Bradley Dixon, said his officers didn\u2019t either. Decatur chief Brad Allen did not respond to questions.<\/p>\n When Riverton officer Herzog ran Daniel Torrez\u2019s name the night of that traffic stop, he didn\u2019t contact the FBI; the database did.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re checked against immigration databases. An arrest for almost anything \u2014 a DUI, shoplifting \u2014 can surface a decades-old immigration record and tell ICE exactly where to find the person.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a former Department of Homeland Security attorney, said the automatic sharing of data \u201cis a fundamental threat to protective laws for residents and visitors in any given state.\u201d<\/p>\n In a statement, a spokesperson for the FBI said agents \u201cwork within the law and policy to support our partners in immigration enforcement and protect the U.S. from a variety of threats.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t opt out of the system or dictate what Illinois State Police or federal agents do with the data. As O\u2019Fallon chief Kirk Brueggeman put it, the department has \u201cno say in how a federal agent \u2014 operating under a different set of laws \u2014 uses those resources that we do not control.\u201d<\/p>\n Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly didn\u2019t respond to questions about how his agency transmits data to federal agencies.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cI\u2019m going to do everything I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.\u201d At a conference this past April, he recalled how he\u2019s been standing up to Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant policies since the president\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n Pritzker didn\u2019t respond to questions about how state police share immigration-related information.<\/p>\n \n By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In February, Zenobia Jones, an administrative staffer for the Atlanta, Georgia, immigration court prosecutor, asked Aurora police records staff<\/a> for documents related to an individual \u2014 but didn\u2019t get far.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Illinois TRUST Act generally prohibits local law enforcement from sharing information with federal immigration agencies with limited exceptions,\u201d 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<\/a> from the same department. Robles handed Ortiz the same response. Ortiz never wrote back, either.<\/p>\n But for all the resistance the Aurora Police Department put up against ICE requests, it couldn\u2019t stop the automatic sharing of fingerprints gathered in the course of routine arrests \u2014 three of which, court records show, were used as part of federal immigration cases.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The TRUST Act bars Illinois jails from similar contracts with ICE, and explicitly bars them from honoring ICE detainers \u2014 civil requests to hold a person past their scheduled release. It also prohibits jails from handing anyone over to ICE.<\/p>\n Some jails do it anyway, at the Marshals\u2019 direction.<\/p>\n In October 2025, a man who\u2019d 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<\/a> asking if the agency could take him from the jail, then told the jail ICE would collect him on October 12.<\/p>\n That day, a sergeant confirmed to Patterson and several ICE agents that the man \u201cwas picked up by ICE approximately 0715 this morning.\u201d<\/p>\n Two months later, the Marshals Service instructed the jail<\/a> to release another man into ICE custody, and once again, the jail obliged.<\/p>\n Marion County Sheriff Kevin Cripps, who runs the jail, insists his office did nothing wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe at no time had contact with ICE,\u201d he said. His jail houses people for the Marshals Service, and when he releases them he does so only while \u201cacting under their authority.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In a statement, the Marshals placed responsibility on the sheriffs.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cShould state law prohibit the jails from honoring detainers,\u201d a spokesperson said, the agency \u201cwould anticipate that the jails follow their state law.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked whether his office would do anything to address the practice, Attorney General Raoul declined to answer.<\/p>\n State laws bind local officials but can\u2019t bind the federal government. As Garc\u00eda Hern\u00e1ndez, the law professor, explained, \u201cthe Marshals Service or DHS, they can come knocking as often as they like\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s 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 \u201callow the exceptions to swallow the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n In some counties, sheriffs aren\u2019t taking direction from the Marshals Service and are instead honoring ICE detainers directly \u2014 a direct violation of the TRUST Act. Records indicate that at least four counties have done so since Trump returned to office.\u00a0<\/p>\n In late June 2025, Hancock County State\u2019s Attorney Bobi James emailed ICE agent Ron Shevela<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI could send you a detainer before then, if you\u2019d like,\u201d wrote the agent.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat would probably be necessary,\u201d James replied.\u00a0<\/p>\nCollaboration by Keystroke<\/h2>\n
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The Officers with Two Badges<\/h2>\n
Collaboration by Default<\/h2>\n
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Honoring ICE Detainers<\/h2>\n