* WGN TV…

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. […]

Kankakee County earned $17M from the federal government renting jail space to ICE from 2016-2022 [when a new state law prohibited it]. 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.

* The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights’ senior policy counsel Fred Tsao issued this response to the story…

To say that people arrested in Kankakee County were released “because state law prevents [the Sheriff] from asking about immigration status” is false, and to say that police in Illinois are “handcuffed” when it comes to people in the country without authorization is simply untrue. The TRUST Act does not include any restrictions on Illinois county sheriffs or state’s attorneys from arresting, charging, and sentencing people for violations of state or local laws. On a daily basis across Illinois, sheriffs release people who have served their time, have their charges dropped, or who are no longer ordered to be held on pretrial detention by a judge — as it should be as a matter of fairness and simple due process.

But the TRUST Act is in place to protect immigrants from being punished a second time for the same violation after serving their sentence or paying their fine, or from being put at further risk of deportation even before their local charges are adjudicated. And from how the Kankakee sheriff is telling this story, it shows exactly why we need laws like the TRUST Act and Illinois Way Forward as we face an overzealous incoming presidential administration hellbent on disrupting life for immigrants in Chicago and Illinois.

As to the specific incident in the WGN segment, I’m left with more questions: what happened to the other person who was held? What charges were filed? Couldn’t the judge (unnamed in the segment) have used their discretion under the SAFE-T Act to hold both of them? To the Kankakee sheriff’s other comments in the segment, why does he feel like he even needs to ask the “countless people” released in his county about their immigration status? Couldn’t he and his officers simply continue doing their work as they have since Illinois Way Forward went into effect in 2021? What makes it different now, other than being emboldened by the new administration?

Truthfully, this sounds like a combination of (1) complaints from a sheriff who lost out on millions in rent from ICE seeking additional reason to profile and punish community members based only on his perceptions and assumptions of their immigration status since he is not allowed to affirmatively ask about it, and (2) a news report that takes what the sheriff was saying at face value when further questions could have poked holes in the story he was trying to tell.

* OK, according to a Shaw Local story from last month, one was held because he had a criminal record. The other was released under the Pre-Trial Fairness Act because the locals thought he didn’t have a criminal record. But it turns out he did have a juvenile record that California did not transmit right away.

Also, FYI, state law does allow local law enforcement to cooperate if ICE produces a judicial warrant.

* From that Shaw Local story…

According to a Wednesday news release, the SAFE-T Act required officials to hold a pretrial release hearing within 48 hours of the arrest.

“Before the hearing, Grundy County officials confirmed that both suspects were Honduran nationals, with one having an immigration detainer warrant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” according to the release. “At the hearing, the local state’s attorney requested detention for both suspects due to the severity of the charges.”

The court granted one detention request based on the outstanding warrant and criminal history, and the other suspect was released because he had no criminal history available within the 48-hour hearing window.

California authorities informed Grundy County that the released suspect, an 18-year-old, had a juvenile record that would have led to his detention, according to the sheriff’s office.

Also from the story…

“Let’s be clear about the facts,” [Ben Ruddell, the Director of Criminal Justice Policy for the ACLU of Illinois] said. “The requirement that an arrested person appear before a judge within 48 hours is a constitutional standard that was in place before the Pretrial Fairness Act went into effect. In fact, the current law allows prosecutors to request additional time, up to 48 hours, to prepare for a detention hearing. No such request was made in this case.”

However…

For receiving records, [Kyle Klukas, the First Assistant State’s Attorney] said the issue arises that records departments typically only work Monday to Friday. Since the arrest was made on a Thursday and the trial was on a Friday, the time the county was able to detain Barahona would’ve run out.