Tinley Park police Officer Jason L’Amas was conducting a routine background check during a traffic stop when he found a federal warrant attached to the driver’s name, calling for the driver to be removed from the country, according to a police report obtained by the Southtown.
L’Amas reported the man, along with his address, phone number, vehicle, place of employment and mother’s name to the U.S. Bureau of Immigration Aug. 27, 2025, according to the report.
The driver was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 13 days later, on Sept. 9, 2025, according to emails between L’Amas and a federal Department of Homeland Security agent. The Daily Southtown obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.
This traffic stop, beginning with a speeding ticket and ending in federal custody, raises questions about the effectiveness of the Illinois TRUST Act in preventing local law enforcement from assisting with civil immigration enforcement, according to one of the writers of the law, Fred Tsao.
The officers’ actions after finding the warrant, while definitely violating the spirit of the act, may actually expose some gray areas in the application of the law, said Tsao, who also works as senior policy counsel for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
The TRUST Act was signed into law by Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2017 in its original form before Gov. JB Pritzker and the Democrat-led legislature amended it in 2021. It generally prohibits local and state law enforcement from assisting the federal government in immigration enforcement matters.
“It seems like what happened here definitely breaks with the spirit of the TRUST Act,” Tsao said. “But it’s safe to say that there’s a lot of gray area, and as much as we want to discourage active information sharing and communication with, you know, in order to facilitate immigration enforcements, there’s still language in the TRUST Act that could be clearer.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois took a stronger approach, with communication director Ed Yohnka calling the actions “a shocking betrayal of public trust and a blatant disregard for Illinois law.”
“I think to any reasonable person the officer engaged in federal civil immigration enforcement, and this is what the TRUST Act prohibits,” Yohnka said. “The whole thing is just really disappointing.”
Tinley Park Village Manager Pat Carr said L’Amas complied with the act and standard traffic stop procedures, but refused to take any other questions or allow police to be interviewed.
The Illinois attorney general’s office declined to be interviewed. A spokesperson said in a statement the office would investigate any claim but would not comment on anything pending.
The Southtown made several attempts to identify and contact the man, including reaching out to immigration advocates, attorneys and searching court records, but the man’s name was redacted from public records.
The traffic stop
L’Amas was traveling east on 167th Street in Tinley Park when a Nissan Frontier truck flew past him, traveling west at 56 mph, 21 mph over the posted speed limit, according to the police report.
L’Amas made a U-turn, turned on his lights and the vehicle pulled over in a strip mall parking lot on the south side of 167th Street, the police report said.
The driver said he was trying to make it to the bathroom, L’Amas said in the report. While the driver used the bathroom, L’Amas ran the driver’s vehicle registration the police database.
The license check revealed the administrative warrant, along with a contact number.
Tsao said it is not uncommon for law enforcement officers to be notified of these warrants when running a person’s information.
“The more concerning piece is what he did next,” Tsao said.
L’Amas contacted the number given for the Bureau of Immigration and spoke with specialist Molly Fuller, informing her he had found the warrant and had the driver on a traffic stop.
Fuller emailed L’Amas a photo of the driver at age 20, which L’Amas compared to the driver’s license photo. Fuller asked L’Amas to obtain the driver’s mother’s name, and L’Amas complied.
Fuller said that was enough confirmation for her, and she requested L’Amas to verify the driver’s address, phone number, vehicle and place of employment so she could send the information to a field office.
L’Amas obtained the information from the driver and passed it along.
Then he gave the driver a speeding ticket, and nothing else was noted in the police report.
Tsao called the officer’s actions troubling, but said it is unclear if they violated the law for two main reasons.
He said that under the TRUST Act, officers can volunteer information to federal immigration enforcement officers, but responding to questions or inquiries from federal officers is closer to what the act prohibits. He said it’s hard to know without a full recording of the conversation between L’Amas and Fuller.
“It could have been Fuller was peppering this guy with questions and he was responding, or it’s entirely possible that he called up Fuller on the line and started blurting out this information, which is technically volunteering information,” Tsao said.
“This is where the wording of the statute gets a little tricky,” he said.
He said it could be troubling under the act that L’Amas complied with requests to obtain the driver’s mother’s name and verify the driver’s information.
But even more important to know, he said, is if the driver was in the officer’s custody. The TRUST Act prohibits police from providing information regarding someone in custody to an immigration agent.
“If the driver is actually during a traffic stop in police custody, then yeah, there’s a problem here,” he said. “He did let the motorist leave after receiving a ticket. All of that said, though, obviously ICE was able to use the information that the officer provided to flag the motorist down and make an arrest within days.”
Thirteen days later, L’Amas received an email from DHS deportation officer Edward Stodolny that read, “just a heads up we took this guy into custody today.”
L’Amas then sent Stodolny his police report on the traffic stop.
“Received Thanks,” responded Stodolny.
Yonhka said he was shocked by how friendly this communication seemed, which he said was one of the concerns that prompted passage of the TRUST Act — that some local officers might have a relationship with an immigration enforcement officer and have some sort of back and forth.
“I think it suggests a certain comfort level on the part of the officer and the DHS agent to, you know, there, it feels like there’s some sort of a relationship here or a budding one,” he said.
Yohnka said the actions also suggest “either Tinley Park has not made its officers aware of what the particular responsibilities are under the TRUST Act and assured their officers are fulfilling that obligation.”
Or he said the officer could have thought the law did not apply to him.
“This is a police officer, someone sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution who thinks that their vision and their view of this is more important than whatever the requirements of the law are,” he said. “That’s the part that’s really the betrayal of trust.”
The TRUST Act
Yohnka said the main goal of the TRUST Act, when initially passed in 2017 and built upon with the Way Forward Act in 2021, was to increase public safety by promoting cooperation between law enforcement agencies and communities.
Tsao said that essentially, the act aims to ensure people are not afraid to call 911. The acronym stands for Transparency and Responsibility in Understanding State and local Trust.
“If people think that the police are in cahoots with ICE, then yeah, that’s going to deter people from seeking law enforcement assistance,” he said.
awright@chicagotribune.com
