On a crisp October day two guys sped away from Illinois State Police and later, officers from two county sheriff’s departments. The men were arrested only after they tried to flee through a corn field where their car caught fire. Inside, police say they found three kilos of drugs laced with fentanyl. Police reports say the men denied knowing the drugs were hidden in the floorboard of the car they claimed to have “borrowed” from someone in California. One said they “fled in fear of being deported,” according to a police report.
Within days a judge released one of the men after an initial check found no criminal record.
“Guarantee you’ll never see him again,” Kankakee County sheriff Mike Downey said. “I can’t call ICE and say ‘This individual is getting released tomorrow, or in three hours.’ I can’t. So he walks out the door.”
The Illinois law that prohibits local police from cooperating with immigration agents and detaining a person because of their immigration status was actually signed by a republican governor, Bruce Rauner, during the first Trump administration. Supporters say it allows people in this country illegally to feel safe reporting when they’ve been a victim of crime and cooperate with police investigating crime.
Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Illinois) strengthened the law in 2021 banning local police from allowing their jail space to be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detention and deportation purposes.
Kankakee County earned $17M from the federal government renting jail space to ICE from 2016-2022. The sheriff says cooperating with immigration – and deportation – is about much more than money.
“I just don’t believe that Illinois will ever be a safe state until our governor decides to effect policy change and I don’t see him doing that,” Downey said.
Pritzker has vowed to stand between the incoming Trump administration’s plans for mass deportation and Illinois immigrants, including the more than 50,000 people who have been sent to Chicago in recent years while their asylum claims are processed. The governor’s office declined to comment on whether Pritzker might soften his stance when it comes to people in this country illegally who are charged with committing crimes. Asked later, Pritzker drew the distinction between people who have already faced trial in a criminal case: “Violent criminals who are undocumented and convicted of violent crime should be deported,” Pritzker said.
Mass deportations on the scale President-elect Trump is threatening would be unprecedented.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan said during an appearance in Chicago that the city would be ‘ground zero’ for the effort.
“Chicago is in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks,” Homan told the gathering.
Threats like that send a chill through immigrants of all types.
“The folks that maybe commit a crime is very, very small in the immigrant community and mass deportation is talking about millions of people,” said Erendira Rendon of The Resurrection Project. “In order to get millions of people you are going to be removing folks who may be homeowners who have been here 20-30 years, like in the case of my family.”
Rendon came to the United States at the age of four to be reunited with her father. She has protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program knowns as “DACA;” but fears Trump could revoke the status for so-called “Dreamers” even though he has said they could be allowed to stay as part of a larger compromise with Congress.
“You can’t keep saying it is only the immigrants’ fault when, at the end of the day, Congress hasn’t passed a bill since 1986 to fix it,” Rendon said.
