SPRINGFIELD — A downstate Republican lawmaker is urging Illinois prison employees to secretly send her information on undocumented immigrants who are behind bars so she can pass the information on to federal immigration authorities, raising concerns from a civil liberties group that she’s encouraging the workers to circumvent the state’s sanctuary law.
“If you are (Illinois Department of Corrections) staff who wants ICE to know of an illegal immigrant in IDOC call or message me,” state Sen. Terri Bryant of Murphysboro wrote in posts on X earlier this week. “I won’t rat you out. I will notify ICE.”
Bryant’s messages were posted two days after President Donald Trump took office and vowed to immediately crack down on illegal immigration by authorizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to conduct mass deportation missions in Chicago and other sanctuary cities.
Bryant, who was a Trump delegate at last year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, worked for 20 years at IDOC and retired when she was first elected to the legislature in 2014.
On Wednesday night, Bryant wrote three posts on X that include what appears to be an IDOC internal order telling state prison workers not to assist federal authorities in any immigration enforcement against people incarcerated in the state prison system.
Under the 2017 Trust Act, law enforcement in Illinois, including IDOC corrections officers, are generally barred from assisting federal law enforcement in immigration matters. But Bryant said in her posts that if IDOC employees confide in her about undocumented prison inmates, she will bring the information to the feds without revealing her source.
“The Illinois Dept. of Corrections has issued direction to staff to follow the Illinois Trust Act. This direction may place staff in a position to either lose their job or violate Federal Law,” she said in one post. “ICE can’t get a judicial order if they don’t know the offender is incarcerated.”
“IDOC staff are prohibited from notifying or cooperating w/ICE so no way for ICE to know the offender is incarcerated,” Bryant noted in her post.
Edwin Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said Bryant was clearly trying to encourage IDOC employees to circumvent the Trust Act.
“We don’t have a ‘choose your own adventure of a private system’ where you can decide whether or not to follow the law,” Yohnka said. “A legislator encouraging people to find a workaround in which she would individually participate is really, I think it doesn’t reflect well on the legislative process in the state of Illinois. You know, (you) want people to follow the law. And that should include legislators.”
In an interview, Bryant defended her posts and said that IDOC employees could potentially be put in a position where they would be violating a federal law, referring to a statute that bars anyone from knowingly harboring an undocumented immigrant.
“So now we’ve put staff in a position where they have to decide, do they want to violate federal law or do they want to violate state law. And in this case, I don’t want them to do either,” Bryant said. “The (Trust Act) doesn’t say they can’t come to me. It just says they can’t go to ICE.”
“I’m not telling them to call them. I’m telling them if they want to call me, they can call me and then I’ll figure out what to do with it,” she said.
The ACLU disputed Bryant’s interpretation of the harboring law and noted the courts have repeatedly upheld sanctuary policies like those in the Trust Act.
Bryant, who said she doesn’t “generally respond to anything that the ACLU says,” said that IDOC workers can notify her about undocumented people behind bars and “we’ll take it from there.”
An IDOC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Bryant’s messages.
In response to Bryant’s social media posts, a spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker said the Trust Act is compliant with federal law and accused Illinois Republicans, including Bryant, of “spreading inaccurate information to incite fear among hard-working state employees.”
“Instead of encouraging state employees to follow both federal and state law, they are sowing chaos and fear,” Pritzker spokesperson Olivia Kuncio said.
lllinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office declined to comment about Bryant’s tweets but on Thursday said it had issued updated guidance to state, county and local law enforcement to clarify their role in relation to federal immigration laws.
“Civil immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government. State law does not grant local law enforcement the authority to enforce federal civil immigration laws. This includes participating, supporting or assisting in any capacity with federal immigration enforcement operations unless federal agents have a criminal warrant or federal law specifically requires it,” Raoul said in a statement.