This story was produced in partnership with Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago focused on the court system.
Rolando Perez Samayoa had come to the US in 2023 seeking safety. Fleeing violence in Mexico, he’d first planned to make a life in Alabama but had been told that Illinois would protect immigrants like him. “There’s some kind of law there,” he said. “It’s supposed to be a sanctuary.”
He was referring to the state’s 2017 TRUST Act, which was meant to keep local law enforcement out of federal deportation efforts. Samayoa made his way to southern Illinois and found work cleaning a factory. After a DUI arrest in Marion County last October, Samayoa said, he attended his hearings—a fact confirmed by court records.
In late January, John Christeson, an assistant state’s attorney in the office prosecuting the case, emailed an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, about Samayoa. The message included his date of birth, an upcoming court date, and where he lived: Centralia, Illinois.
“Ok, we’ll take care of it, thank you,” the federal agent, Sergio Fulgencio, wrote back minutes later. Two days later, he wanted to know more: “Do you have any reports on this guy?”
Christeson sent him the police report and related tickets. Three weeks later, federal agents apprehended Samayoa outside his home. They hauled off his 17-year-old son, too.
The exchange is among dozens of emails reviewed by Injustice Watch that reveal a pattern of consequential collaboration between county prosecutors and federal immigration agencies across Illinois during the first 15 months of President Donald Trump’s second term.
State’s attorneys offices in 1 out of every 6 Illinois counties acted as valuable assets of federal immigration enforcement, sharing sensitive personal data about the people they were prosecuting without criminal warrants, public disclosure, or legislative oversight and with no accounting of how often it happened or who was affected.
Sometimes, prosecutors volunteered information on their own. Other times, they simply answered when Department of Homeland Security agents came calling. The correspondence crossed party lines and included everyone from paralegals to elected state’s attorneys. The collaboration typically happened without the knowledge of defendants or their attorneys.
The TRUST Act bars police and other agencies from helping federal agents deport people absent a federal criminal warrant. But the law doesn’t squarely answer whether prosecutors and their staff are bound by those same restrictions.
Since Trump took office for the second time, his administration has ramped up immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation, and ICE has visibly displayed its enforcement at worksites, front yards, and courthouses. In response, states including New York have joined Illinois and more than a dozen others in barring local police and sheriffs from helping with federal immigration enforcement. But the scale of prosecutor collaboration in Illinois—which is one of the largest sanctuary states and is often cited as a national model—raises questions about the limitations of state laws to protect immigrants.
Injustice Watch filed Freedom of Information Act requests with all 102 Illinois state’s attorney’s offices and drew on records from federal and circuit courts. Together, those internal emails and case files ran more than 5,000 pages. The documents reveal that prosecutors shared much more than just names. Their emails contain photographs. Home addresses. The date and time a defendant was due in court or set to leave jail—the exact window for ICE to make an arrest.
Eleven offices didn’t respond; some produced records only after Injustice Watch sued them under FOIA. The rest remain in litigation.
And the written record may be only part of the story. Messages with phrases like “Thank you for taking my call” point to conversations no records requests could follow.
None of it was inevitable. Dozens of Illinois county prosecutors, faced with the same federal pressure, claimed they had no record of contact with ICE, and at least one made a point of shutting it out—suggesting every act of collaboration was a choice.
And the choices had consequences: People flagged to ICE were detained and deported, tearing families apart.