The Bloomington Police Department received no requests to cooperate with immigration enforcement in three years, according to police chief Jamal Simington.
Simington gave a presentation about policing amid the Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up deportations during a quarterly meeting of the Public Safety and Community Relations Board [PSCRB] this week.
Police departments in Illinois are required to report requests for assistance to the state’s attorney general, since cooperation with federal immigration enforcement violates the Illinois TRUST Act.
Failure to comply with the TRUST Act could result in a police department being sanctioned, Simington said.
Simington reinforced that state and federal law designate immigration and deportation as an administrative, civil process, not a criminal one.
“The TRUST Act… recognizes that strong police relationships with communities are important,” Simington said. “If we serve a body of a population that does not have trust of the police, certainly it prohibits or handicaps our ability to protect the vulnerable.”
State law and city ordinance prohibit officers from asking about immigration status.
Simington said the TRUST Act, signed into law by Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2017, also restricts law enforcement from giving federal law enforcement access to individuals in custody at the county jail or detaining people subject to an administrative deportation warrant.
In a report released late last year, the attorney general’s office said four Illinois sheriff’s offices self-reported violating the state’s sanctuary laws and transferred individuals into federal custody in 2024.
An undocumented person who gets arrested on criminal charges, however, may draw the attention of federal immigration authorities.
“As soon as we make an arrest, the person goes to the county. They’re processed at the sheriff’s department. In that procedure of being processed, they are fingerprinted,” Simington said. “Those fingerprints are then transferred to the federal government, the FBI.
“At some point, they learn that a person is in custody. That’s beyond our control. The FBI requires us to fingerprint folks for arrest records.”
The law also encourages victims of crime who might be facing deportation to cooperate with police. And undocumented immigrants who are victims of human trafficking or certain other crimes may be eligible for a temporary, 4-year visa if they assist with a police investigation.
“There has to be proof there was some abuse, either mental and/or physical, which have occurred in the United States,” Simington said. “The burden is on them to prove, and usually they’re able to do that through victims advocacy representatives or an attorney.”
Since 2023, the number of people requesting these, referred to as U- and T-visas, has increased three-fold. Simington said Sgt. Kiel Nowers, the department’s U-Visa coordinator, processed four U- and T-Visas total in 2023, three in 2024 and 13 in 2025.
Simington attributes the uptick to increased knowledge about the program. Nowers has participated in community engagement events about immigration and coordinated with the Immigration Project to raise awareness about that option.
Simington said his agency isn’t warned about Immigrations and Customs Enforcement [ICE] officers’ presence in Bloomington, and were made aware of some ICE activity in the city through community members. ICE has detained a small number of immigrants in Bloomington-Normal in the past year as major operations unfolded in large cities, including Chicago.
Balancing public safety and state law has been a topic of much debate among his peer police chiefs, Simington said.
“It causes a significant appearance of conflict at all levels of government,” he said, “but especially with law enforcement.”
Municipal police officers might be responsible for working at a public protest, for example, but also can’t block ICE officers from conducting an operation.
“We have taken an oath to make sure we follow the law in Illinois,” he said. “We also have a commitment to our community members to make sure that they stay safe. We cannot, will not, be obstructionists to the federal government.”
That could get an officer arrested, he said.
“However, it’s important we take a position of educating out community, giving them lines of engagement,” Simington said. “Just because police departments around the United States have been seen at the same incident that ICE is at doesn’t mean that they’re there to support ICE. In theory, or in practice, they’re there to protect the community the best way that they’ve been able to.”
