DU QUOIN — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested five men on their way to work in late January in Du Quoin, marking one of the first reported mass ICE enforcement actions this far south in Illinois under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

ICE agents in an unmarked vehicle were conducting surveillance in Perry County on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 29, when they pulled over their truck and detained them, according to the owner of Alstat Wood Products, a sawmill in Du Quoin where the men had been working.

Those arrested were 53-year-old Carlos Sanchez-Luna of Mexico; 37-year-old Guadalupe Hernandez Lopez of Mexico; 27-year-old Ramiro Lopez Alvarez of Mexico; 28-year-old David Ernesto Rodriguez-Mejia of El Salvador, and 42-year-old Gilberto Gomez Perez of Mexico. They were booked that same day and sent to the Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, officials at the jail confirmed.

Rodriguez-Mejia was transferred and is currently being held in the Greene County Jail in Springfield, Missouri. Gomez Perez was transferred to Greene County on Feb. 3 and was later extradited from the facility by ICE on Feb. 6, according to staff at Greene County Jail. ICE did not return multiple calls and emails seeking information on his whereabouts.

The Perry County Weekly-Press, which first reported on Feb. 11 the names of those detained, cited an ICE spokesperson as saying that a sixth man — 38-year-old Yecfren Alexander Alvarez, of Honduras — had also been arrested. However, reporters from the Daily Egyptian at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Capitol News Illinois could not independently verify his detention, location or status.

ICE did not respond to multiple requests for confirmation or to comment on the arrests.

Daniel Alstat, owner of Alstat Wood Products, said the detainment of the workers took him by surprise.

“I did not dream of this, really, to be honest with you — until I got the phone call saying that they’d been picked up,” he said.

Alstat Wood Products is a family-owned sawmill and logging company located just off of Illinois 127 in rural Perry County, Illinois. The company has been in operation since 1988 and is one of the few remaining sawmills in southern Illinois.

Alstat said he has struggled at times to fill certain labor-intensive positions with local workers, particularly during parts of the year when demand is highest. Depending on the season, the company employs about 25 to 30 people, many of them family members.

The visa and immigration status of the five individuals detained in Du Quoin is unclear. Alstat said he was told that the five employees he subcontracted had six-month work visas.

Looking for additional laborers to begin work in 2026, other sawmill owners pointed Alstat to a contracting company called Midwest Lumber Solutions Inc.

Through this company, Alstat said he hired five men on six-month contracts at the beginning of the new year in what he called an “experimental” approach to finding employees.

“When I signed the contract for the five employees, basically it states that they’ll (Midwest Lumber) be responsible for them,” Alstat said.  “When I ran it through my people and got it approved, it was all good. So, we just kind of went from there.”

Diego Rest, of Kissimmee, Florida, the owner of Midwest Lumber Solutions Inc., which operates out of Missouri and Florida, confirmed that the employees had been hired by his firm and contracted to work at Alstat. He said he’d been aware they were detained by ICE but declined further comment.

Rest is also the owner of Midwest Outsourcing Inc., located in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

According to Alstat, Rest’s contracting company was responsible for providing housing and transportation for the men. They had been living in a trailer on North Howard Street in Du Quoin since November, according to neighbors, who were familiar with them and knew that they worked at Alstat.

Quiet neighbors

Multiple neighbors said they recalled more than one instance of police activity at the trailer during the months the men lived there. Several described what they believed was an incident weeks earlier in which individuals were placed in handcuffs and taken into custody. However, reporters were unable to determine which agency was involved, what prompted the response or independently verify the account.

Perry County State’s Attorney Matt Foster said his office had no reports involving the men or the address in question. A review of Judici, the online court records system used by most southern Illinois counties, did not show any pending charges for the men in Perry, Jackson or Union counties.

One neighbor, Tristan Gossman, said he didn’t hear much from the men, though had been familiar with where they lived.

“Good neighbors are quiet neighbors,” Gossman said “They must have come and gone at different hours. I didn’t know there was more than a couple people living there. I had not a single problem with them.”

Other neighbors said they occasionally heard loud music at night, and said it appeared multiple people were living in the home.

Du Quoin is home to about 5,600 residents — 2.44% of which are Hispanic, according to Data USA, and is best known for the Du Quoin State Fair and Street Machine Nationals, which brings thousands of visitors to town during the summer.

Under the TRUST Act, Illinois state law prohibits local and state police officers and other officials from cooperating with ICE, with some limited exceptions.

Du Quoin Mayor Josh Downs said he did not learn about the ICE activity until after the men had been detained.

“Du Quoin police were not notified beforehand or asked to participate in any way with any ICE activities in Du Quoin,” Downs said. “They were notified afterward by a resident who noticed unmarked vehicles in town.”

The report from the Weekly-Press cites ICE Public Affairs Officer Nina Pruenda saying that ICE, along with federal partners, conducted a vehicle stop during a targeted enforcement operation and encountered six men — all which Pruenda told the Weekly-Press have warrants out for their arrest.

Alstat said it was his understanding that the men were pulled over by ICE as part of a broader surveillance effort by the agency in the region, and that the workers were not necessarily the target of it.

“From the details I’m gathering, they were pulled over on an actual highway,” Alstat said. “They got in their vehicle and started coming to work and drove through an area where they (ICE) were looking for people in another spot and when they happened to drive by with some Hispanic looking people they (ICE) went, ‘Oh look at that, let’s question these people.’”

Temporary labor

Intensified ICE action over the past year in places like Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and others, has produced a plethora of legal battles concerning the conduct and procedures involving arrests and detentions made by ICE agents, such as Perdomo vs. Noem.

Perdomo, represented by the ACLU, alleges that recent ICE activity violates the Fourth Amendment because ICE agents are racially profiling and conducting stops on individuals without reasonable suspicion. The ongoing case has made its way to the Supreme Court, where it saw a contentious concurring opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“He (Kavanaugh) suggested that if ICE knows people are working in jobs typically held by immigrants, or at workplaces where immigrants often work, if they’re speaking Spanish or doing other things typically associated with undocumented individuals, that might give law enforcement reasonable suspicion to stop and question them,” said Cindy Buys, a professor in the Southern Illinois University Simmons Law School, who specializes in immigration law.

Buys said that H-2A visas are used for agricultural workers, and that many southern Illinois farmers use them to add employees for seasonal labor.

“It sounds like they had some kind of temporary visa, meaning they were lawfully present and had employment authorization,” Buys said. “However, depending on the nature of their criminal records, that could invalidate their ability to remain and work lawfully. For those without criminal records, if they were here on valid temporary visas, there shouldn’t be a reason to arrest and detain them.”

A wide range of criminal behavior puts an individual at risk of losing immigration status, including most misdemeanors.

Buys said that obtaining immigration visas can be time-consuming, and that some companies specialize in handling that process.

“Companies with expertise in the visa process may act as the employer of record and subcontract workers to local businesses,” Buys said. “There’s nothing inherently improper about that arrangement.”

Alstat said he entered into the contract for workers in good faith, and that the situation has been unsettling to him.

“If I’d have known this was going to go down this way, I maybe would have chosen a different path to approach this,” Alstat said. “But still, I needed the labor. It was a chance I was willing to take. At the same time, I don’t know that there’s really been anything that’s gone wrong with anybody, because I still haven’t understood why they were taken if they had that paperwork. So I don’t know yet.”

This story was produced for Capitol News Illinois through the Saluki Local Reporting Lab, supported by grant funding from the SIU Foundation and the Illinois Press Foundation. Jackson Brandhorst and Lylee Gibbs are students at Southern Illinois University, and senior members of the Daily Egyptian, SIU’s student newspaper. Brandhorst can be reached at jbrandhorst@dailyegyptian.com and Gibbs at lgibbs@dailyegyptian.com.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.