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Local Cops Flout Sanctuary Law to Help ICE Deport Immigrants

Illinois law prohibits local collaboration with immigration enforcement officials, but the cops often find workarounds.

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.

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, Illinois. 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 state 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.”

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.

FBI Redirected a Quarter of Staff to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push

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’s 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........

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