The County Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants

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.