{"id":5953,"date":"2026-08-25T11:05:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T11:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=5953"},"modified":"2026-08-25T11:05:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T11:05:36","slug":"the-county-prosecutors-who-became-ice-informants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=5953","title":{"rendered":"The County Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This story was produced in partnership with Injustice Watch<\/a>, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago focused on the court system.<\/em><\/p>\n

Rolando Perez Samayoa had come to the US in 2023 seeking safety. Fleeing violence in Mexico, he\u2019d first planned to make a life in Alabama but had been told that Illinois would protect immigrants like him. \u201cThere\u2019s some kind of law there,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s supposed to be a sanctuary.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was referring to the state\u2019s 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\u2014a fact confirmed by court records.<\/p>\n

In late January, John Christeson, an assistant state\u2019s attorney in the office prosecuting the case, emailed an agent with Homeland Security Investigations<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cOk, we\u2019ll take care of it, thank you,\u201d the federal agent, Sergio Fulgencio, wrote back minutes later. Two days later, he wanted to know more: \u201cDo you have any reports on this guy?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s second term.<\/p>\n

State\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s attorneys. The collaboration typically happened without the knowledge of defendants or their attorneys.<\/p>\n

The TRUST Act bars police and other agencies from helping federal agents deport people absent a federal criminal warrant. But the law doesn\u2019t squarely answer whether prosecutors and their staff are bound by those same restrictions.<\/p>\n

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\u2014which is one of the largest sanctuary states and is often cited as a national model\u2014raises questions about the limitations of state laws to protect immigrants.<\/p>\n

Injustice Watch filed Freedom of Information Act requests with all 102 Illinois state\u2019s attorney\u2019s 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\u2014the exact window for ICE to make an arrest.<\/p>\n

Eleven offices didn\u2019t respond; some produced records only after Injustice Watch sued them under FOIA. The rest remain in litigation.<\/p>\n

And the written record may be only part of the story. Messages with phrases like \u201cThank you for taking my call\u201d point to conversations no records requests could follow.<\/p>\n

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\u2014suggesting every act of collaboration was a choice.<\/p>\n

And the choices had consequences: People flagged to ICE were detained and deported, tearing families apart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019d first planned to make a life in Alabama but had been told that Illinois would protect immigrants like him. 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