WASHINGTON—Yesterday, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a brief in an Illinois federal district court attacking Illinois’ TRUST Act, a law barring state law enforcement officers from cooperating and sharing information with federal immigration law enforcement. The federal government has sued the state over this law, claiming it violates the supremacy of federal law set forth in the Constitution.
The TRUST Act, meant to protect illegal aliens and criminal aliens in Illinois from detection, apprehension, and removal, forbids state and local law enforcement to tell federal officials when aliens will be released from state custody, to transfer custody to federal officials, or to reveal aliens’ contact information. These policies, IRLI shows in its brief, stand as obstacles to Congress’s purposes in the immigration laws, such as apprehending and removing illegal aliens, removing aliens who have committed aggravated felonies, and achieving operational control of the border. In this way, the law conflicts with federal law, and is preempted under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Also, IRLI makes another argument the government has so far not mentioned: the TRUST Act also conflicts with federal law because it commands state and local officials to commit the federal crime of harboring removable aliens. For example, if federal authorities ask state or local officers for the home address of an alien, the TRUST Act forbids those officers to provide that information. But if they do not provide it, those officers are concealing the whereabouts of the alien from federal authorities, in violation of the harboring law. Because the TRUST Act thereby makes it impossible for officials to obey both federal and state law, it presents a textbook case of conflict preemption.
“Border Czar and former IRLI Senior Fellow Tom Homan has vowed to arrest and prosecute state officers to the full extent of the law, and our brief shows this is no idle threat,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “And because, in Illinois, it is the TRUST Act that makes these officials criminals, that law is flatly unconstitutional. We hope the court sees the patent logical inconsistency of the TRUST Act with federal law, and strikes it down.”
The case is United States v. Illinois, No. 1:25-cv-1285 (N.D. Ill.).
