A Marion County prosecutor emailed a Homeland Security Investigations agent the date of birth, upcoming court date, and Centralia address of Rolando Perez Samayoa, a man facing a DUI charge — information that set in motion the removal of Samayoa and his 17-year-old son from the United States earlier this year. The disclosure is one of dozens uncovered in a sweeping review of how Illinois prosecutors interacted with federal immigration agents during the first 15 months of President Donald Trump's second term, even as a state law is supposed to bar exactly that kind of cooperation.
The findings come from the Chicago Sun-Times, which examined more than 5,000 pages of federal and circuit court records, emails, and case files gathered by Injustice Watch after the nonprofit filed Freedom of Information Act requests with all 102 Illinois state's attorney offices. The joint investigation, produced in partnership with WIRED, found that in roughly one county out of every six, prosecutors acted as de facto federal immigration enforcement assets, sharing names, photographs, home addresses, court dates and jail-release windows with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — often without criminal warrants, public disclosure or legislative oversight.
A Centralia Father's Case Becomes a Target
Marion County Assistant State's Attorney John Christeson emailed Homeland Security Investigations agent Sergio Fulgencio about Samayoa's case, sending along the police report and related traffic tickets. According to court records, Samayoa had attended his criminal court hearings, and Fulgencio told Christeson that ICE would take care of Samayoa's case before requesting additional reports on him. Christeson also told federal agents that the county's own warrant would not take priority over a removal order, effectively clearing the way for federal custody.
Federal agents later apprehended Samayoa outside his Centralia home and detained his 17-year-old son as well. Per the Department of Homeland Security, both father and son accepted voluntary departure and were escorted across the border into Ciudad Juarez on February 25. Samayoa's family was separated for two months before reuniting, according to the investigation.
DuPage and Other Counties Went Further, Records Show
DuPage County prosecutor's office staff contacted federal immigration agents more often than any other Illinois prosecutor's office identified in the investigation, and at times went beyond simply answering requests — the office's staff offered specific cases for federal agents to pursue, per the Sun-Times review. In one instance, the DuPage County prosecutor's office sent the voting records of two county residents to Customs and Border Protection within 90 minutes of a request tied to an April 2025 voter fraud inquiry; CBP had issued the request via an administrative subpoena from the Department of Homeland Security. DuPage County State's Attorney Bob Berlin said his office reviewed the subpoena before producing the records and maintained that the contacts were permitted under the TRUST Act's criminal-investigation exception, adding that the law applies to his office and staff.
Elsewhere, Cass County State's Attorney Craig Miller shared information about three defendants with federal agents, while Kane County prosecutor staff asked Customs and Border Protection to identify three people through facial recognition — a stance Kane County has defended before. Mason County prosecutor Gwendolyn Thomas contacted federal immigration agents on at least five occasions, shared prosecuted men's details including possible jail-release times, asked whether defendants were on a deportation list, and referred Cass and Mason county prosecutors to Homeland Security investigator Kevin Parks. Marion County's Christeson separately offered another person with a local warrant to federal immigration agents.
Not Every County Played Along
The response was far from uniform. More than half of Illinois state's attorney offices reported no record of contact with ICE since Trump returned to office, and 11 offices did not respond to the records requests at all. Jackson County treated federal agents' questions as Freedom of Information Act requests and answered with redactions under Illinois public-records law.
Lake County State's Attorney Eric Rinehart took the most direct stance against cooperation, issuing a policy barring ICE officials from private areas of his office without a judge-signed warrant and circulating Illinois Attorney General guidance on TRUST Act compliance to police chiefs. Rinehart said the TRUST Act does not technically apply to his office because it does not arrest or detain people, but he declined to collaborate with federal immigration enforcement anyway. That split mirrors the divide Hoodline has tracked as Cook County pursues potential charges against ICE agents while Evanston police asked prosecutors to weigh charges against federal agents in a separate incident.
A Law With a Gap Nobody Has Closed
The 2017 TRUST Act, signed by then-Governor Bruce Rauner, requires a federal criminal warrant before police or other agencies help federal agents deport people and generally restricts local law enforcement cooperation with federal deportation efforts. But the statute does not clearly specify whether prosecutors and their own staff are bound by its restrictions, and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has not resolved that ambiguity. Raoul said applying the TRUST Act requires navigating complex interactions between different parts of the criminal legal system, while University of Kentucky law professor Matthew Boaz said the law's underlying sentiment appears to include every actor within the criminal legal system, prosecutors included.
Legal scholars described this kind of local prosecutor collaboration with federal immigration agents as unprecedented. Governor JB Pritzker, who called Illinois the most welcoming state in the country back in 2021, signed a law in December 2025 barring civil immigration arrests within 1,000 feet of a courthouse — part of a broader legislative push that also produced the Illinois Bivens Act, letting people sue federal agents for constitutional violations during immigration enforcement.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said ICE officers are trained to use the minimum force necessary and receive ongoing use-of-force training, addressing broader concerns about agent conduct during the enforcement surge. That surge has been sweeping: federal authorities arrested more than 4,000 people across Illinois between September and December 2025 alone during Operation Midway Blitz, according to the Associated Press, with only 15% of those apprehended found to have criminal records, mostly for traffic violations and misdemeanors.
Why the Legal Fight Keeps Escalating
The prosecutor disclosures land amid an already fractured legal landscape. The Department of Justice sued Pritzker and the state in December 2025, arguing that Illinois' courthouse and hospital buffer-zone restrictions are unconstitutional and endanger federal officers. Meanwhile, the Illinois Attorney General holds statutory authority under the TRUST Act to investigate compliance violations and subpoena local agency records, though Raoul has said his office relies primarily on technical assistance and guidance rather than sanctions, according to Capitol News Illinois.
Advocates have long pointed to research showing why the stakes of local cooperation with ICE run deeper than any single case. A 2013 University of Illinois Chicago survey cited during TRUST Act legislative proceedings found that 44 percent of Latino respondents said they would be less likely to contact police as crime victims for fear officers would ask about immigration status, according to the Latino Policy Forum. That research underpinned the TRUST Act's original purpose — and the new prosecutor findings suggest that purpose is still being tested county by county, case by case, years after the law took effect.
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