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In less than a month the U.S.’s immigration policy could change dramatically.
What might that mean for Kankakee County where 13% of its population is of Hispanic or Latino origin, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s estimates in 2023 is yet unknown.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in 2025. No one locally has seen or heard of how this might be carried out in Kankakee County by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
Kankakee County Sheriff Mike Downey said, by law, he can’t communicate with ICE.
Downey hasn’t heard of any planned sweeps by ICE agents.
“What they do in Chicago is a whole other thing,” he said. “But no, they have not contacted me. I have not contacted them. I have reached out to other federal people, mainly the U.S. Marshals, to see what they know. And they don’t really know anything with ICE either.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Illinois Way Forward law in 2021, prohibiting counties from having agreements with ICE to house immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally. It went into effect Jan. 1, 2022, and the law also prohibits any future agreements.
Downey said his department can’t help ICE in what it might do.
“We can’t assist them in any way, but they are certainly on their own to go much like the [U.S.] Marshals and DEA and the FBI,” he said. “They can go knocking on doors and all that stuff, just without local law enforcement in Illinois.”
If ICE officials were to detain any undocumented residents in Kankakee County, they would be held in facilities in bordering states, most likely jails in Lake and Porter counties in Northwest Indiana.
HOW MANY
How many undocumented immigrants live in Kankakee County?
“We have no clue,” Downey said. “We have no idea. … We don’t know a number [of undocumented individuals].”
City of Kankakee Police Chief Chris Kidwell said he doesn’t know the number of undocumented immigrants in the city, but he said there are some here, based on the department’s interactions with social service agencies.
“There’s people being helped in our area,” Kidwell said. “We don’t have very much involvement there.”
Steve Hunter, Kankakee County Board member and former Kankakee alderman, said the Hispanic population has been an asset in the community.
“Restaurants, auto repair, all that stuff,” he said. “They’ve got skill sets, and they’re providing a lot of services for our people here. They’re not gang-banging, doing this or doing that. They’re assets. They helped in the local economy.”
County board member Jessica Andrade, who represents parts of Kankakee, said no one has reached out to her about concerns on upcoming changes in immigration policy at the federal level.
“I think Kankakee County is a welcoming place, so I know they’ll do the right thing,” she said. “We have great people that we work with — the sheriff, our mayors.”
She added that Hispanics that have relocated to Kankakee have been here for a very long time and have worked very hard. She hasn’t heard much about any undocumented immigrants that have come here.
“That’s a great thing, right?” she said.
Andrade, who is bilingual, was the first Hispanic elected to the county board in November of 2022. She’s been a translator for 12 years and helps fellow Hispanics understand property taxes and what regulations are city and what are county. She’s gotten to know city officials in the process.
MASS DEPORTATIONS
One of Trump’s campaign promises was that he would start mass deportations once he takes office. No plans have been formally announced.
A Kansas official who’s an informal adviser to Trump’s transition team on immigration issues doesn’t expect mass deportations to prompt arrests of migrants at sensitive locations such as schools and churches, according to a story by the Associated Press.
But Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach does expect Trump to take action that will spark a legal challenge over the citizenship status of children born in the U.S. to immigrants living in the country illegally.
Also at question will be those who are DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), meaning they arrived in the U.S. as children. DACA temporarily delays the deportation of people without documentation who came to the U.S. as children. Renewal is not automatic, according to USA.gov.
Pritzker has vowed to protect all Illinois resident, regardless of immigration status.
Tom Homan, a veteran of immigration law enforcement, is set to come back from retirement in January to serve in one of the incoming Trump administration’s newest roles, as the border czar, according to various published reports. Homan won’t be part of any federal agency, but he will work from the White House.
Pritzker has an issue with Homan’s role.
“I’m open to dialogue with [Homan],” said Pritzker in a Dec. 12 interview with WGN-TV. “I will say that he does not have the authority to do the things that he’s talked about. Being a border czar is not an official position in the government.”
Also part of the WGN-TV news report was an interview with Erendira Rendon, of Chicago. She came to the U.S. when she was 4 to be reunited with her dad.
Rendon is one of 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., according to the report. She has temporary protection under DACA, and those immigrants are referred to as Dreamers. She is the vice president of Immigrant Justice, the resurrection project in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.
“You can’t keep saying it’s immigrants fault when, at the end of the day, Congress hasn’t passed the bill since 1986 to fix it,” Rendon said.
Trump has indicated that he’s open to a deal to allow Dreamers to stay, yet Rendon said in the WGN-TV report that she fears what damage mass deportations might cause.
“Because the folks that actually that maybe committed crime is very, very small in the immigrant community,” she said. “Mass deportations is talking about millions of people, and so in order to get to millions of people, you are going to be removing folks who may be homeowners, who may have been here for 10, 20, 30 years, like in the case of my family.”
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